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Americans have choices ahead. Charles Krauthammer explains the direction that liberalism is leading our nation, through its foreign policy of apologies and appeasement, and through its domestic policy of increasing governmental control, restraining our economy and threatening security. He ends with how we can change directions. Brace yourselves, Charles went long today in this adaptation of a speech he made last week.

…my thesis is simple: The question of whether America is in decline cannot be answered yes or no. There is no yes or no. Both answers are wrong, because the assumption that somehow there exists some predetermined inevitable trajectory, the result of uncontrollable external forces, is wrong. Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is written. For America today, decline is not a condition. Decline is a choice. Two decades into the unipolar world that came about with the fall of the Soviet Union, America is in the position of deciding whether to abdicate or retain its dominance. Decline–or continued ascendancy–is in our hands. …

…Which leads to my second proposition: Facing the choice of whether to maintain our dominance or to gradually, deliberately, willingly, and indeed relievedly give it up, we are currently on a course towards the latter. The current liberal ascendancy in the United States–controlling the executive and both houses of Congress, dominating the media and elite culture–has set us on a course for decline. And this is true for both foreign and domestic policies. Indeed, they work synergistically to ensure that outcome. …

…The New Liberalism will protest that despite its rhetoric, it is not engaging in moral reparations, but seeking real strategic advantage for the United States on the assumption that the reason we have not gotten cooperation from, say, the Russians, Iranians, North Koreans, or even our European allies on various urgent agendas is American arrogance, unilateralism, and dismissiveness. And therefore, if we constrict and rebrand and diminish ourselves deliberately–try to make ourselves equal partners with obviously unequal powers abroad–we will gain the moral high ground and rally the world to our causes. …

…This deliberate choice of strategic retreats to engender good feeling is based on the naïve hope of exchanges of reciprocal goodwill with rogue states. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the theory–as policy–has demonstrably produced no strategic advances. …

…Domestic policy, of course, is not designed to curb our power abroad. But what it lacks in intent, it makes up in effect. Decline will be an unintended, but powerful, side effect of the New Liberalism’s ambition of moving America from its traditional dynamic individualism to the more equitable but static model of European social democracy.

This is not the place to debate the intrinsic merits of the social democratic versus the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism. There’s much to be said for the decency and relative equity of social democracy. But it comes at a cost: diminished social mobility, higher unemployment, less innovation, less dynamism and creative destruction, less overall economic growth. …

…This shift in resources is not hypothetical. It has already begun. At a time when hundreds of billions of dollars are being lavished on stimulus and other appropriations in an endless array of domestic programs, the defense budget is practically frozen. Almost every other department is expanding, and the Defense Department is singled out for making “hard choices”–forced to look everywhere for cuts, to abandon highly advanced weapons systems, to choose between readiness and research, between today’s urgencies and tomorrow’s looming threats.

Take, for example, missile defense, in which the United States has a great technological edge and one perfectly designed to maintain American preeminence in a century that will be dominated by the ballistic missile. Missile defense is actually being cut. The number of interceptors in Alaska to defend against a North Korean attack has been reduced, and the airborne laser program (the most promising technology for a boost-phase antiballistic missile) has been cut back–at the same time that the federal education budget has been increased 100 percent in one year. …

…Decline is a choice. More than a choice, a temptation. How to resist it?

First, accept our role as hegemon. And reject those who deny its essential benignity. There is a reason that we are the only hegemon in modern history to have not immediately catalyzed the creation of a massive counter-hegemonic alliance–as occurred, for example, against Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany. There is a reason so many countries of the Pacific Rim and the Middle East and Eastern Europe and Latin America welcome our presence as balancer of power and guarantor of their freedom.

And that reason is simple: We are as benign a hegemon as the world has ever seen. …

…There are, of course, major threats to the American economy. But there is nothing inevitable and inexorable about them. Take, for example, the threat to the dollar (as the world’s reserve currency) that comes from our massive trade deficits. Here again, the China threat is vastly exaggerated. In fact, fully two-thirds of our trade imbalance comes from imported oil. This is not a fixed fact of life. We have a choice. We have it in our power, for example, to reverse the absurd de facto 30-year ban on new nuclear power plants. We have it in our power to release huge domestic petroleum reserves by dropping the ban on offshore and Arctic drilling. …

…Nothing is written. Nothing is predetermined. We can reverse the slide, we can undo dependence if we will it.

The other looming threat to our economy–and to the dollar–comes from our fiscal deficits. They are not out of our control. There is no reason we should be structurally perpetuating the massive deficits incurred as temporary crisis measures during the financial panic of 2008. A crisis is a terrible thing to exploit when it is taken by the New Liberalism as a mandate for massive expansion of the state and of national debt–threatening the dollar, the entire economy, and consequently our superpower status abroad. …

Jennifer Rubin starts with an amazing call to Obama from Bob Kerry to act more like Bush. She then makes an important point, that Obama feels himself to be above any obligations of national or historical context. He feels he is above the presidency, above the nation. Whether he believes he must keep his own word remains to be seen.

…What is at stake, Kerrey argues, is whether Obama can cut through the cant about another Vietnam (the war hero explains: “This war is not Vietnam. The Taliban are not popular and have very little support other than what they secure through terror”) and keep his word. He argues: “When it comes to foreign policy, almost nothing matters more than your friends and your enemies knowing you will keep your word and follow through on your commitments. This is the real test of presidential leadership.” …

…Now maybe Obama doesn’t consider the promises of his predecessors to be binding on him. After all, he remarked after sitting through a Daniel Ortega rant that he didn’t want to be held responsible for the Bay of Pigs, which occurred when he was 3 years old. In other words, he may not see himself as the successor to previous presidents’ obligations. He stands above and apart from mere parochial Americanism. He is in essence a free agent, without the burden of deals, understandings, and obligations undertaken by those who came before him, and most particularly George W. Bush.

But Afghanistan is different. He was the one who defined it as a critical war. He was the one who set the strategy to defeat the Taliban. He was the one who hired Gen. Stanley McChrystal to come up with an alternative to the losing counterterrorism strategy. So it’s not merely a case here of stepping apart from his predecessors’ promises, but from his own. If he can’t manage to do even that, friends and allies soon will see America as unreliable and untrustworthy. It will be the dawning not of an age of multilateral nirvana, but of every-country-for-itselfism. The result will be a more dangerous and less predictable world. And it won’t be at all what the Nobel Committee had in mind.

More bad news from that Universal Health Care Wonderland, Massachusetts. Wendy Williams writes that they are being fined because the state changed the rules on health care.

My husband retired from IBM about a decade ago, and as we aren’t old enough for Medicare we still buy our health insurance through the company. But IBM, with its typical courtesy, informed us recently that we will be fined by the state.

Why? Because Massachusetts requires every resident to have health insurance, and this year, without informing us directly, the state had changed the rules in a way that made our bare-bones policy no longer acceptable. Unless we ponied up for a pricier policy we neither need nor want—or enrolled in a government-sponsored insurance plan—we would have to pay $1,000 each year to the state. …

…IBM seems like a rock of stability compared to the state of Massachusetts. It’s apparent that state health-care policies can change at the whim of politicians in Boston, and we might not be able to adjust to the new rules. The way we figure it, if we sign up for a state-subsidized plan we will be at the mercy of the state.

So we are sticking with our plan and paying the tax. But what bothers me most is that a similar health-care mandate is being proposed in Washington, and some of the same promises that were made here are being made again—such as that the mandate will never hit middle-class folks with a new tax. …

…The mandate in Massachusetts was sold as something that wouldn’t penalize people like my husband and me. But those political promises were only good for as long as it took to get the mandate enacted into law.

Paul Hudson, on the BBC News, asks what happened to global warming. He looks at the current theories.

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?  …

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Responsible governing means making tough choices. Obama has generals who give realistic assessments about Afghanistan. Obama also has advisers who promise everything can be won for one low price, or alternatively that promises can be broken, explains Charles Krauthammer.

…The White House began leaking an alternate strategy, apparently proposed (invented?) by Vice President Biden, for achieving immaculate victory with arm’s-length use of cruise missiles, Predator drones and special ops.

The irony is that no one knows more about this kind of warfare than Gen. McChrystal. He was in charge of exactly this kind of “counterterrorism” in Iraq for nearly five years, killing thousands of bad guys in hugely successful under-the-radar operations.

When the world’s expert on this type of counterterrorism warfare recommends precisely the opposite strategy — “counterinsurgency,” meaning a heavy-footprint, population-protecting troop surge — you have the most convincing of cases against counterterrorism by the man who most knows its potential and its limits. And McChrystal was emphatic in his recommendation: To go any other way than counterinsurgency would lose the war.

Yet his commander in chief, young Hamlet, frets, demurs, agonizes. His domestic advisers, led by Rahm Emanuel, tell him if he goes for victory, he’ll become LBJ, the domestic visionary destroyed by a foreign war. His vice president holds out the chimera of painless counterterrorism success.

Against Emanuel and Biden stand Gen. David Petraeus, the world’s foremost expert on counterinsurgency (he saved Iraq with it), and Stanley McChrystal, the world’s foremost expert on counterterrorism. Whose recommendation on how to fight would you rely on?

Less than two months ago — Aug. 17 in front of an audience of veterans — the president declared Afghanistan to be “a war of necessity.” Does anything he says remain operative beyond the fading of the audience applause?

NRO staff posted Krauthammer’s remarks on Afghanistan from Fox News All-Stars. Says Krauthammer, Obama’s Afghanistan rethink is all politics.

…Then he goes through all the people he consulted with [in that review]: the commanders on the ground, allies, NGOs and the governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan and members of Congress. It was a serious review in March.

He appoints his own general later and then he says two months ago it is a war of necessity. You would think he has thought it through.

And now all of a sudden he is rethinking it. It is because of the political pressure. The public opinion polls are going negative on him. He has gotten [resistance from] his left in the party, and it is all about the politics. It is not about the strategy. …

Congress is still hard at work trying to force socialized medicine down our throats, writes David Harsanyi. First, they beat the CBO into submission:

If you’ve been watching noted alchemist and Democratic Sen. Max Baucus conjure up health-care gold this week, you probably know what I mean. …

…Just think of legislation as abstract art. The Congressional Budget Office does.

The CBO’s new estimate, which magically meets every one of President Barack Obama’s preconditions, is based on “conceptual” language provided by Baucus rather than any of those maddeningly specific Arabic numerals.

That’s because the estimate isn’t rooted in an actual bill, per se . . . nor does it incorporate hundreds of amendments that will be part of any final product, well, not exactly . . . What we do have is a CBO that has been browbeaten long enough by the White House to finally summon the conviction to get a figure that so many wanted to hear.

It’s also, believe it or not, free. …

…How exactly does health care “reform” pay for itself in Wonderland? In this case, it pays for itself by charging taxpayers new “fees,” delivering new mandates and penalties, adding pass-through costs and cutting hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare. …

Then they want to start taxing us in 2010 for their legislation that won’t be enacted in 2013:

…CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf had previously warned that Medicare Advantage payment cuts had the potential to hurt seniors’ private health plans, which, of course, is the point of “reform.”

The most exhilarating aspect of this plan, however, isn’t that it does nothing to contain costs for average consumers, it’s that the average consumer will help pay for it long before they fail to receive any tangible benefits.

According to Democrats, health care reform must be passed this very moment even though it would not kick in until 2013. But don’t worry, it would start taxing Americans in 2010, three years before you get nothing. …

Liberal speechwriter Wendy Button moved to Massachusetts, where many of the proposed healthcare reforms have been enacted. She can no longer afford health insurance. Her commentary is in Politics Daily.

…here’s how I lost my insurance: I moved. That’s right, I moved from Washington, D.C., back to Massachusetts, a state with universal health care.

In D.C., I had a policy with a national company, an HMO, and surprisingly I was very happy with it. I had a fantastic primary care doctor at Georgetown University Hospital. As a self-employed writer, my premium was $225 a month, plus $10 for a dental discount.

In Massachusetts, the cost for a similar plan is around $550, give or take a few dollars. My risk factors haven’t changed. I didn’t stop writing and become a stunt double. … There has been no change in the way I live my life except my zip code — to a state with universal health care.

Massachusetts has enacted many of the necessary reforms being talked about in Washington. There is a mandate for all residents to get insurance, a law to prevent insurance companies from denying coverage because of a pre-existing condition, an automatic enrollment requirement, and insurance companies are no longer allowed to cap coverage or drop people when they get sick because they forgot to include a sprained ankle back in 1989 on their application. …

…How could all of these weeks and months go by and no one is examining and talking about what has worked and what hasn’t worked in Massachusetts?

While the state has the lowest rate of uninsured, a report by the Commonwealth Fund states that Massachusetts has the highest premiums in the country. The state’s budget is a mess and lawmakers had to make deep cuts in services and increase the sales tax to close gaps. The number of people needing assistance has at times overwhelmed the state. The mandate means that some people who can’t afford insurance are now being slapped with a fine they also can’t afford. There is no “public option” in the way the president describes it, no inter-state competition, no pool for small businesses and self-employed individuals like me to buy into groups that negotiate cheaper rates. …

…What makes this a double blow is that my experience contradicts so much of what I wrote for political leaders over the last decade. That’s a terrible feeling, too. I typed line after line that said everything Massachusetts did would make health insurance more affordable. If I had a dollar for every time I typed, “universal coverage will lower premiums,” I could pay for my own health care at Massachusetts’s rates. …

John Stossel points out that paying Paul less means the government can rob Peter less.

“The government who robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul,” George Bernard Shaw once said.

For a socialist, Shaw demonstrated good sense with that quotation. Unfortunately, America has become a laboratory in which his hypothesis is being tested. …

…Frederic Bastiat, the great 19th-century French economist, defined the state as “that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” I don’t know if he envisioned one half of the population living off the other half. …

…The built-in unfairness of the tax system has prompted a range of tax-reform proposals, such as a flat tax and replacing the income tax with a sales tax. These alternatives are better, but they have their drawbacks, too. For that reason, there is something more urgent than tax reform: spending reform.

The true burden of government, the late Milton Friedman said, is not the tax level but the spending level. Taxation is just one way for the government to get money. The other ways — borrowing and inflation — are also burdens on the people. The best way to lighten the tax burden is to lessen the spending burden. If government spends less, it takes less. And if it takes less, the tax system will weigh less heavily on us all. …

Walter Williams gives different examples in which a society has allowed its government to increase in power and control, for the stated purpose of “social justice”.  When a society starts accepting that the ends justify the means, ruthless leaders with murderous means have come to power.

…The most authoritative tally of history’s most murderous regimes is in a book by University of Hawaii’s Professor Rudolph J. Rummel, “Death by Government.” Statistics are provided at his website. The Nazis murdered 20 million of their own people and those in nations they captured. Between 1917 and 1987, Stalin and his successors murdered, or were otherwise responsible for the deaths of, 62 million of their own people. Between 1949 and 1987, Mao Tsetung and his successors were responsible for the deaths of 76 million Chinese.

Today’s leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from Nazism. However, there’s little or no distinction between Nazism and socialism. Even the word Nazi is short for National Socialist German Workers Party. The origins of the unspeakable horrors of Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism did not begin in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s. Those horrors were simply the end result of long evolution of ideas leading to consolidation of power in central government in the quest for “social justice.” It was decent but misguided earlier generations of Germans, like many of today’s Americans, who would have cringed at the thought of genocide, who built the Trojan horse for Hitler to take over.

Few Americans have the stomach or ruthlessness to do what is necessary to make their governmental wishes come true. They are willing to abandon constitutional principles and rule of law so that the nation’s elite, who believe they are morally and intellectually superior to the rest of us, can have the tools to implement “social justice.” Those tools are massive centralized government power. It just turns out last century’s notables in acquiring powerful central government, in the name of social justice, were Hitler, Stalin, Mao, but the struggle for social justice isn’t over yet, and other suitors of this dubious distinction are waiting in the wings.

In the WSJ, Hannah Karp paints an enjoyable portrait of Joe Torre and his pre-game interviews.

The Los Angeles Dodgers limped disappointingly into the division series this week, but there’s still one record Joe Torre can boast about as he enters his 14th consecutive postseason: His pregame media sessions are, by a landslide, the longest and most honest in baseball.

Described by beat writers over the years as “a must-listen,” “a delight” and “baseball’s version of the sermon on the mount,” Mr. Torre’s daily meetings with the press have become the stuff of legend. For nearly an hour before every home game, the soft-spoken 69-year-old sits cross-legged like a Zen master in the Dodgers’ dugout, sipping green tea or chomping pink gum and gazing out toward the palm trees that surround the stadium as he waxes poetic about everything from players’ antics to his own days as a catcher to the time he took his daughter to a Jonas Brothers concert. On a slow day he might tell the one about the Boston fan he once met in an elevator who told him he’d rather see the Red Sox beat the Yankees than see the U.S. capture Saddam Hussein, or he might reminisce about how relievers were rumored to sneak out of Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia to a local bar through a secret passageway near the bullpen. …

…While the baseball world is salivating over the prospect of a World Series matchup between Mr. Torre’s Dodgers and his former team, the New York Yankees, the skipper’s sessions with the press rarely focus on such grandiose questions. Last week he regaled reporters with stories about his recent conversations with director Spike Lee, insisted that his players deserved to pop champagne even if they lost their last series with the Colorado Rockies, expressed relief that his 13-year-old daughter was now wearing Andre Ethier jerseys to games (she routinely sported Yankees attire to Dodgers Stadium last season) and joked about how Derek Jeter used to flex his muscles around the locker room.

“I like to humanize some of the players that people think are plastic,” says Mr. Torre. …

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Today we are, all Prize, all the time, since many of our favorite pundits have comments on the latest attempt of free-riding, left-wing Euro-weenies to interfere in U. S, politics. The week started with Saturday Night Live joking about Obama, and the Nobel committee kept it going. They have truly “jumped the shark.” Conservatives are mostly amused, but liberals are aghast as the hollowness is plain for all to see.

And, think about poor Bill Clinton. When not fighting off the Lewinsky mess, Clinton spent his second term campaigning for this. He took his eye off the job of protecting our country and didn’t pursue bin Laden because angering the Arab world might have prevented some murky Israeli peace deal that could put him over the top.

Read on and enjoy John Fund, Mark Steyn, David Warren, Peter Wehner, Jennifer Rubin, Abe Greenwald, Claudia Rosett, Ed Morrissey, Richard Cohen, and Michael Graham. The joke continues with Scrappleface, the Borowitz Report, and eight cartoonists led by Michael Ramirez who hangs the prize on a tele-prompter.

John Fund

This year’s awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama can only hasten the decline in prestige of an award that has already gone to people like Yasser Arafat, UN General Secretary Kofi Annan (who presided over the Iraqi oil-for-food scam) and the fabulist Guatemalan activist Rigoberta Menchu. For this year’s Nobel, the deadline was February 1, barely ten days after Mr. Obama had assumed the presidency. Though the Nobel committee of five Norwegian politicians presumably considered the evidence over the summer, it’s fair to say their award represents little more than wishful thinking that Mr. Obama’s diplomatic efforts will ultimately bear fruit.

Other U.S. Presidents have won Nobels, but for actual accomplishments. Teddy Roosevelt helped broker a peace treaty between Russia and Japan. Woodrow Wilson worked to build a lasting peace after the end of World War I, however unsuccessful that effort later proved. Even Jimmy Carter won the Peace Prize in 2002 after more than two decades of humanitarian efforts as a former president.

Of course Mark Steyn has an excellent piece. We start first with his hilarious opening:

The most popular headline at the Real Clear Politics Web site the other day was: “Is Obama Becoming A Joke?” With brilliant comedic timing, the very next morning the Norwegians gave him the Nobel Peace Prize. Up next: His stunning victory in this year’s Miss World contest. Dec. 12, Johannesburg. You read it here first.

For what, exactly, did he win the Nobel? As the president himself put it:

“When you look at my record, it’s very clear what I have done so far. And that is nothing. Almost one year and nothing to show for it. You don’t believe me? You think I’m making it up? Take a look at this checklist.”

And up popped his record of accomplishment, reassuringly blank.

Oh, no, wait. That wasn’t the real President Barack Obama. That was a comedian playing President Obama on “Saturday Night Live.” And, for impressionable types who find it hard to tell the difference, CNN – in a broadcast first that should surely have its own category at the Emmys – performed an in-depth “reality check” of the SNL sketch. That’s right: They fact-checked the jokes. Seriously. “How much truth is behind all the laughs? Stand by for our reality check,” promised Wolf Blitzer, introducing his in-depth report with all the plonking earnestness so cherished by those hapless Americans stuck at Gate 73 for four hours with nothing to watch but the CNN airport channel.

Read on for the serious commentary:

…For these and other “extraordinary efforts” in “cooperation between peoples”, President Obama is now the fastest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in history. Alas, the Alas, the extraordinary efforts of those first 12 days are already ancient history. Reflecting the new harmony of U.S.-world relations since the administration hit the “reset” button, The Times of London declared the award “preposterous,” and Svenska Freds (the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society) called it “shameful.” There’s something almost quaintly vieux chapeau about the Nobel decision, as if the hopeychangey bumper stickers were shipped surface mail to Oslo and only arrived last week. Everywhere else, they’re peeling off …

…From about a year after the fall of Baghdad, Democrats adopted the line that Bush’s war in Iraq was an unnecessary distraction from the real war, the good war, the one in Afghanistan that everyone – Dems, Europeans, all the nice people – were right behind, 100 percent. No one butched up for the Khyber Pass more enthusiastically than Barack Obama: “As President, I will make the fight against al-Qaida and the Taliban the top priority.” (July 15, 2008)

But that was then, and this is now. As the historian Robert Dallek told Obama recently, “War kills off great reform movements.” As the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne reminded the president, his supporters voted for him not to win a war but to win a victory on health care and other domestic issues. Obama’s priorities lie not in the Hindu Kush but in America: Why squander your presidency on trying to turn an economically moribund feudal backwater into a functioning nation state when you can turn a functioning nation state into an economically moribund feudal backwater?

Gosh, given their many assertions that Afghanistan is “a war we have to win” (Obama to the VFW, August 2008), you might almost think …that it’s the president and water-bearers like Gunga Dionne who are the “cynics.” In a recent speech to the Manhattan Institute, Charles Krauthammer pointed out that, in diminishing American power abroad to advance statism at home, Obama and the American people will be choosing decline. There are legitimate questions about our war aims in Afghanistan, and about the strategy necessary to achieve them. But, eight years after being toppled, the Taliban will see their return to power as a great victory over the Great Satan, and so will the angry young men from Toronto to Yorkshire to Chechnya to Indonesia who graduated from Afghanistan’s Camp Jihad during the 1990s. And so will the rest of the world: They will understand that the modern era’s ordnungsmacht (the “order maker”) has chosen decline.

Barack Obama will have history’s most crowded trophy room, but his presidency is shaping up as a tragedy – for America and the world.

Alfred Nobel took steps to try to prevent his prize from being used to influence world leaders and events, according to David Warren.

…It is also perhaps worth exculpating Alfred Nobel, for the farce his peace prize has become. The man took various precautions in his will to make sure it would not be cheaply politicized, and specifically that it would never be used as a means to influence current events. It was to be a retrospective award, for specific accomplishments universally acknowledged, and thus the opposite of a partisan statement. But Nobel’s will was written in 1895, by the brilliant entrepreneur who converted a failing iron and steel mill into an extremely successful munitions factory. And as students of philanthropy should know, “good intentions” generally go the way of the Munich agreement. …

…Instead, I think the intention of the prize, for which nominations closed on Feb. 1 — less than a fortnight after Obama took office — is in fact designed as an essay in pre-emption. The left-wing, pacifist committee wanted to saddle the new U.S. president with their little “hope diamond,” in case he got any ideas about killing more jihadis in Afghanistan. Or hesitated to do to Israel what Neville Chamberlain did to Czechoslovakia.

Peter Wehner contrasts Arafat, a terrorist who received the Nobel peace prize, and Bush, a leader who worked for the liberation of two nations of people.

… Bush, during his presidency, took the courageous step of sidelining Arafat rather than building a delusional “peace process” around him. It was Bush who spoke out in a forthright fashion about the need for a Palestinian state – but only if the Palestinians made their own inner peace with the Jewish state and gave up terrorism as an instrument of policy.

…Bush spent much of his presidency working to liberate the enslaved people of Iraq and Afghanistan and helping Iraq become the only democracy in the Arab world. That effort cost Americans a lot in blood and treasure. His presidency was damaged in the process. But the wars themselves were noble efforts — wars of authentic liberation — and ones that Democrats initially supported before the going got tough and they began to flake off.

The Noble Committee long ago ceased to be a serious entity; this choice merely confirms that judgment. It is a tendentious organization. And the easiest way — not the only way, but the easiest way — for Westerners to win praise and honors from it is to be critical of America and Israel. George W. Bush would never do that; he loves and has defended both nations. Sometimes virtue is its own reward.

Jennifer Rubin comes up with an excellent reason why so many liberals are uncomfortable with Obama’s win.

…But what is a bit eye-opening is the level of embarrassment — cringing, really — among those rather sympathetic to Obama. Take a look through the Washington Post’s Post-Partisan blog. Yes, the conservatives are somewhere between appalled and bemused. But so are Richard Cohen, Ruth Marcus, and David Ignatius.

Marcus:

“This is ridiculous — embarrassing, even. I admire President Obama. I like President Obama. I voted for President Obama. But the peace prize? This is supposed to be for doing, not being — and it’s no disrespect to the president to suggest he hasn’t done much yet. Certainly not enough to justify the peace prize.”

Ignatius:

“The Nobel Peace Prize award to Barack Obama seems so goofy — even if you’re a fan, you have to admit that he hasn’t really done much yet as a peacemaker. But there’s an aspect of this prize that is real and important — and that validates Obama’s strategy from the day he took office.”

Mickey Kaus is cringing also. And the AP’s Jennifer Loven is stumped, verging on incredulous. Even the Huffington Post is somewhat mortified. In fact, liberals seems more upset on some level than conservatives, because I think the Left takes this award seriously. Conservatives stopped doing that around the time Yasir Arafat got his. …

Abe Greenwald has wonderful comments about liberals and reality.

Why would Obama have to do anything to earn the Nobel Peace Prize? Has everyone forgotten how he became president of the United States? …

…Today we only deal in make-believe. The Left abhors evidentiary standards. There is global warming in the absence of rising temperature, Israeli war crimes in the absence of unlawful conduct, institutionalized racism in the absence of prejudicial treatment, American imperialism in the absence of empire, and so on.

Seeing what isn’t there is half the job of being on the Left. The other half is changing what isn’t there through costly, intrusive, and ill-conceived initiatives (save 10 percent for keeping Charlie Rangel out of trouble). …

Obama won the Nobel peace prize for disparaging and discrediting the United States in the eyes of the world, writes Peter Wehner. He quotes Charles Krauthammer’s speech about Obama choosing decline for America.

…In his address, Krauthammer says,

“…as he made his hajj from Strasbourg to Prague to Ankara to Istanbul to Cairo and finally to the U.N. General Assembly, Obama drew the picture of an America quite exceptional — exceptional in moral culpability and heavy-handedness, exceptional in guilt for its treatment of other nations and peoples. With varying degrees of directness or obliqueness, Obama indicted his own country for arrogance, for dismissiveness and derisiveness (toward Europe), for maltreatment of natives, for torture, for Hiroshima, for Guantánamo, for unilateralism, and for insufficient respect for the Muslim world. …”

That, in two sentences, explains why Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize today. Now the Nobel Committee couldn’t quite come out and say that directly; it decided to couch the award in this language, taken from the citation: “[Obama’s] diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.”

There you have it: Barack Obama has given voice to what many of the world think about America — and it’s not flattering. That much of the world — composed as it is of autocrats and dictators and weak and wobbly defenders of human rights and human dignity — isn’t happy with the United States is not news. What is news is that an American president would validate many of those charges. I find that deeply disquieting. The Norwegian Nobel Committee, not surprisingly, considers it worthy of its highest honor.

Claudia Rosett looks at another possible motivation for the Nobel committee’s actions. She also notes that many enjoy peace due to the actions of the United States, not due to the positive thinking of the Nobel committee.

…What, more specifically, might they be expecting of Obama? For starters, Norway, along with neighboring Sweden and Denmark, has been banging the drum for America to hand over to the United Nations enormous control over and constraints upon the U.S. economy, in the name of (warming/cooling/take-your-pick) climate change. Thus did Norway’s Nobel committee bestow its favors in 2007 on Al Gore and the UN’s Self-Interested Panel of Politically Corrupted Science — excuse me, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And this December the UN is convening a big climate conference in Copenhagen, with which the U.N. hopes to “seal” its growth-stunting UN-enriching climate “deal.” …

…America, in the course of defending its own freedoms, has long extended to the likes of Norway, Denmark and Sweden a protective umbrella. Under that shelter, too many Europols have come to believe that peace is a function of nothing more than talk and hope and dreams and …premature prizes.

Obama said on Friday morning that he will accept this award as “a call to action.” Action on whose behalf? The five Norwegians who make up the Nobel peace prize committee chose to give him this award, for their own purposes. Obama, and America, owe them nothing. The real hope is that Obama will remember he took an oath (twice) not to serve as global spokesman for the Norwegian Nobel Committee, but “to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Before his presidency is over, keeping faith with that oath may require him to do things would knock the stuffing out of the featherbed philosophy of this sanctimonious crowd of Scandinavian free-riders.

Ed Morrissey reviews liberals’ reactions to the news.

Many of us assumed that the mainstream media outlets would cheer Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize award today, but as Byron York notices, they seem as stunned as everyone else — and also as skeptical.  For instance, the Washington Post reminds readers that two other sitting American Presidents have won the Nobel, but only in their second terms, and only after they’d, er, actually achieved something:

“Obama is the third sitting U.S. president–and the first in 90 years–to win the prestigious peace prize. His predecessors won during their second White House terms, however, and after significant achievements in their diplomacy. Woodrow Wilson was awarded the price in 1919, after helping to found the League of Nations and shaping the Treatise of Versailles; and Theodore Roosevelt was the recipient in 1906 for his work to negotiate an end to the Russo-Japanese war.

In contrast, Obama is struggling over whether to expand the war in Afghanistan, preparing to withdraw from Iraq, and searching for ways to build momentum to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and assemble an international effort to stop Iran’s nuclear program.” …

Richard Cohen extends the farce.

…And again in a stunning coincidence, the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences announced the Oscar for best picture will be given this year to the Vince Vaughn vehicle “Guys Weekend to Burp,” which is being story-boarded at the moment but looks very good indeed. Mr. Vaughn, speaking through his publicist, said he was “touched and moved” by the award and would do everything in his power to see that the picture lives up to expectation and opens big sometime next March.

At the same press conferences, the Academy announced that the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award would go this year to Britney Spears for her intention to “spend whatever it takes to save the whales.” The Academy recognized that Spears had not yet saved a single whale, but it felt strongly that it was the intention that counted most. Spears, who was leaving a club at the time, told People magazine that she would not want to live in “a world without whales.” People put it on the cover.

The sudden spate of awards based on intentions or plans or aspirations was attributed to the decision by the Norwegian Nobel committee to award the peace prize to Barack Obama for his efforts in nuclear disarmament and his outreach to the Muslim world. .. Some cynics suggested that Obama’s award was a bit premature since, among other things, a Middle East peace was as far away as ever and the world had yet to fully disarm. Nonetheless, the president seemed humbled by the news and the Norwegian committee packed for its trip to the United States, where it will appear on Dancing with the Stars.

There are too many Corner posts to spend time mentioning here in the summary. Just scroll down to enjoy. Honorable mention though goes to Andy McCarthy.

… After a number of years, the NFL renamed its Super Bowl trophy after its most fitting recipient — it’s now called the Vince Lombardi Trophy. I’d like to see the Nobel Foundation follow suit. If today’s headlines said, “Barack Obama Wins Yasser Arafat Prize,” that would be perfect.

Michael Graham delivers some well-deserved sarcasm.

…A prize President Obama earned, the Nobel Committee claims, for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples”

This will no doubt come as great comfort to the democracy protesters in Iran, the oppressed citizens of North Korea, the Afghan women being beaten by the Taliban, and the people of Poland, the Czech Republic, Georgia, etc., feeling the hot breath of the growling Russian bear. They’re all basking in that Obama-inspired “peace.” …

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The end of the week, and another great Pickings to keep you warm over the weekend. Dilbert’s here with the story of Saudi Arabia’s a**bomber. And be sure to get to the cartoons to see a view of the world from DemonBaby.com that reminds of the iconic Steinberg New Yorker cover with the U. S. as seen from Ninth Ave.

Read in Commentary what Nixon did to support Israel in the Yom Kippur war and understand why Obama is one of their least favorite U. S. presidents.

…What is clear, from the preponderance of information provided by those directly involved in the unfolding events, is that President Richard Nixon — overriding inter-administration objections and bureaucratic inertia — implemented a breathtaking transfer of arms, code-named Operation Nickel Grass, that over a four-week period involved hundreds of jumbo U.S. military aircraft delivering more than 22,000 tons of armaments.

This was accomplished, noted Walter J. Boyne in an article in the December 1998 issue of Air Force Magazine, while “Washington was in the throes of not only post-Vietnam moralizing on Capitol Hill but also the agony of Watergate …

…“It was Nixon who did it,” recalled Nixon’s acting special counsel, Leonard Garment. “I was there. As [bureaucratic bickering between the State and Defense departments] was going back and forth, Nixon said, this is insane. . . . He just ordered Kissinger, “Get your ass out of here and tell those people to move.”

When Schlesinger initially wanted to send just three transports to Israel because he feared anything more would alarm the Arabs and the Soviets, Nixon snapped: “We are going to get blamed just as much for three as for 300. . . . Get them in the air, now.” …

…As for Meir herself, to the end of her life she referred to Nixon as “my president” and told a group of Jewish leaders in Washington shortly after the war: “For generations to come, all will be told of the miracle of the immense planes from the United States bringing in the materiel that meant life to our people.”

Wrote Nixon biographer Stephen E. Ambrose:

“Those were momentous events in world history. Had Nixon not acted so decisively, who can say what would have happened? The Arabs probably would have recovered at least some of the territory they had lost in 1967, perhaps all of it. They might have even destroyed Israel. But whatever the might-have-beens, there is no doubt that Nixon . . . made it possible for Israel to win, at some risk to his own reputation and at great risk to the American economy.

He knew that his enemies . . . would never give him credit for saving Israel. He did it anyway.”

David Warren takes us along on his thoughts about China.

The 20th century was a disaster in the history of China, even before the Communists came to power in 1949.

An ancient empire that was also an ancient civilization had already endured a massive collision with the civilization of Europe, in which Europe had prevailed. The latter was quite aggressive, the former by its circumstances mostly passive, and the conventional wisdom is that this alone explains the dissolution of the former.

Conventional views are usually wrong, but can be interesting insofar as they may point to the truth by their very inversion of it. The Opium Wars and other military encounters are perhaps over-emphasized in what was more comprehensively a “clash of civilizations” — a collision between European and Chinese understandings of the world itself, in which the self-confidence of the Middle Kingdom was lethally undermined.

The mind of China became partially westernized; the mind of Europe, for all the pleasure it took in acquiring a taste for Chinoiserie — from the admirable Analects of Confucius to the incomparable stoneware pots of the Song Dynasty — did not become Sinified.

To my dangerously self-tutored historical sense, it seems that China had been overrun by “barbarians” before — by Mongols, and Manchurians — and yet assimilated each conqueror and “raised” them to the standards of Chinese civilization. But the European “barbarians” who began arriving at China’s gates half a millennium ago were the end of everything. …

Nine months ago in January 4th’s Pickings, Pickerhead said, “We are likely to see a president who agrees with the person who last spoke to him.” That is the central problem of electing a teleprompted empty suit. WSJ editors provide an overview of the mess made with Afghan policy as the Dems now have zeroed in on the general.

…As we’ve learned the hard way in Iraq and Afghanistan, successful counterterrorism requires intelligence. This comes from earning the trust of the people, which in turn can only happen if they are protected. The Biden approach would pull U.S. soldiers back behind high walls, far from the field of battle, and turns security over to the Afghan army and police before they are prepared for the job.

The sudden Afghan rethink also jeopardizes progress in Pakistan, the world’s leading sanctuary for al Qaeda. The Pakistani willingness to expand American drone strikes and launch a military campaign in their tribal regions dates squarely to the Administration’s recommitment to the region. Now that Mr. Obama is having second thoughts, so might the Pakistanis.

The President’s very public waver is already doing strategic harm. The Taliban are getting a morale boost and claiming victory, while our allies in Europe have one more reason to rethink their own deployments. Such a victory, as the head of the British army Sir David Richards warned on Sunday, would have an “intoxicating effect” on extremist Islam around the world. …

…In an interview with Newsweek, Gen. McChrystal said he wouldn’t resign if the President rejects his request for more troops. If he were really trying to dictate policy, he’d have given a different answer. But we don’t think Gen. McChrystal should stay to implement a Biden war plan either. No commander in uniform should ask his soldiers to die for a strategy he doesn’t think is winnable—or for a President who lets his advisers and party blame a general for their own lack of political nerve.

Jennifer Rubin explains why keeping General McChrystal from talking with Congress hurts the administration.

Michael O’Hanlon of Brookings … therefore argues that there isn’t merely a “right to speak if a policy debate becomes too far removed from reality” but, in essence, an obligation to do so. (”We need to hear from him because he understands this reality far better than most in Washington.”) And O’Hanlon reminds his fellow Democrats that they were the ones pleading with the military to step forward (testify in front of Congress before Donald Rumsfeld’s departure) when Bush’s Iraq policy was faltering.

McChrystal’s forthrightness and the defensive reaction of the White House tell us several things. First, the White House doesn’t have a good response on the merits. “Shut up” is not a policy analysis. Second, whatever processes exist within the White House for decision-making have stalled and malfunctioned, causing the debate to go public. Had a decision been promptly made, none of this would have occurred. And third, now the entire country knows the unified position of the military and understands that the opposition comes from the likes of Joe Biden. The public-relations problem for the White House has gotten much worse.

When we put aside the conflict between the military and the White House, we are still left with the underlying question: Will Obama implement the recommendation of his general to achieve his policy, and if not, why not? Eventually, if he rejects his commanders’ advice, the president will have to live with the consequences, both on the battlefield and at home. And right now, many voters are wondering why the White House is telling its most respected military leaders not to tell the public the unvarnished truth about a war that just seven weeks ago the president declared to be critical to our national security.

Peter Wehner adds his thoughts: the public relations issue may be unpleasant, but the most important result is making a good choice.

…Having worked in three administrations, I understand the agitation that a story like McChrystal’s can cause. But having worked in three administrations I can also testify that it’s imperative that there be open, honest, and rigorous debate; that different points of view be considered; that the strongest arguments against any case be amassed and made; and that what people should say ought to be judged on the merits rather than on the short-term political furor it creates. That’s fairly easy to say from the outside, when you’re not being pounded by the political class or feeling as if you have been boxed into a corner.

But what matters in the end is getting the policy right — and if a painful process leads to a better outcome in the end, it’s more than worth it. That’s easy to forget when you’re working at the highest levels of government and in the line of fire. But it’s precisely because you’re working at the highest level of government and in the line of fire that those lessons need to learned, internalized, and acted on.

If I were working in the Obama administration, I imagine that my first reaction to General McChrystal’s comments would have been negative. But I hope, on reflection, that I would see something else as well — that while McChrystal’s comments may have made life more difficult in the short run for the Obama administration, McChrystal has, in fact, done the administration and the public a favor. Stanley McChrystal deserves to be praised, not criticized, for his candor. We need more of it, at every level of government. It helps, of course, that he also happens to be quite right in his recommendation.

The president thinks too highly of himself, and needs new speechwriters, says George Will.

In the Niagara of words spoken and written about the Obamas’ trip to Copenhagen, too few have been devoted to the words they spoke there. Their separate speeches to the International Olympic Committee were so dreadful, and in such a characteristic way, that they might be symptomatic of something that has serious implications for American governance.

Both Obamas gave heartfelt speeches about . . . themselves. Although the working of the committee’s mind is murky, it could reasonably have rejected Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Games on aesthetic grounds — unless narcissism has suddenly become an Olympic sport. …

Becoming solemn in Copenhagen, Obama said: “No one expects the Games to solve all our collective problems.” That’s right, no one does. So why say that? …

…. But Obama quickly returned to speaking about . . . himself:

“Nearly one year ago, on a clear November night, people from every corner of the world gathered in the city of Chicago or in front of their televisions to watch the results of the U.S. presidential election. Their interest wasn’t about me as an individual. Rather . . .”  …

Liberal Richard Cohen says the Copenhagen trip shows that President does not understand the importance of his position.

Barack Obama’s trip to Copenhagen to pitch Chicago for the Olympics would have been a dumb move whatever the outcome. But as it turned out (an airy dismissal would not be an unfair description), it poses some questions about his presidency that are way more important than the proper venue for synchronized swimming. The first, and to my mind most important, is whether Obama knows who he is.

This business of self-knowledge is no minor issue. It bears greatly on the single most crucial issue facing this young and untested president: Afghanistan. Already, we have his choice for Afghanistan commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, taking the measure of his commander in chief and publicly telling him what to do. This MacArthuresque star turn called for a Trumanesque response, but Obama offered nothing of the kind. Instead, he used McChrystal as a prop, adding a bit of four-star gravitas to that silly trip to Copenhagen by having the general meet with him there.

This is the president we now have: He inspires lots of affection but not a lot of awe. It is the latter, though, that matters most in international affairs, where the greatest and most gut-wrenching tests await Obama. If he remains consistent to his rhetoric of just seven weeks ago, he will send more troops to Afghanistan and more of them will die. “This is not a war of choice,” he said. “This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al-Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans.”

Obama could have gone further. Not only would the Taliban be restored, but the insurgency might consume Pakistan. If that happens, then a nuclear power could become a failed state — Pakistan’s pretty close to that now — and atomic weapons could fall into the hands of terrorist organizations. India, just next door and with mighty antipathy for Muslim terrorism, could well act on its own. …

Excellent piece by David Harsanyi on the types of people who go to the government to create chaos.

Mr. Hoover knows everything. He attended a high-brow graduate school and worked as a Senate aide before becoming a policy expert. (He even pretends to understand Jeremy Bentham.) He is a man who craves acceptance from the other smart people who surround him. …

…If you put a man like Mr. Hoover in charge of government, he’d take to the task with an unrestrained confidence. Since he’s so much smarter than you, he’d have no compunction forcing you to do the right thing on an array of issues, from your light bulbs to your health care. …

…The United States has from its inception squabbled over the appropriate role of government — one that pundits on cable TV, for all their bluster, rightly label a debate between socialism and free markets. Yes, this debate pits the theoreticians against the doers, but it is largely a fight between the state and the individual.

So let’s have the debate. But before we do, let’s understand that Mr. Hoover is going to win. Mr. Hoover always wins. He takes no real risk. If he can’t convince us, he has the power to bribe, print money, “compel” citizens, bully and monopolize the process. It’s no more complicated than that. …

Peter Wehner recounts how E. J. Dionne goes from Afghan hawk to Afghan bug-out.

…On September 15, 2006, he wrote this:

“Both [Joe Biden and John Kerry] emphasized what should be a central element in the debate, the potential disaster looming in Afghanistan. The administration, Mr. Biden said last week, “has picked the wrong fights at the wrong times, failing to finish the job in Afghanistan, which the world agreed was the central front in the war on radical fundamentalism, and instead rushing to war in Iraq, which was not a central front in that struggle.” On Saturday, Mr. Kerry condemned the administration’s “stand-still-and-lose strategy” and called on the administration to send 5,000 more troops to Afghanistan to quell the Taliban insurgency. . . . These speeches reflect a growing consensus among many Democrats: First, that Iraq is a blind alley, a distraction from the war on terror, not its “central front.” Second, that the United States needs a responsible way to disengage from Iraq , re-engage in Afghanistan, and prepare itself to deal with the rising power of Iran, so far a real winner from Mr. Bush’s Iraq policies.”

There is more — but what’s clear is that what was once a “war of necessity” is now, for liberals, a tiresome and troublesome war. Not that long ago, success in Afghanistan was in the vital long-term interest of the country. It was the “central front” in the war against militant Islam, a just conflict in which to re-engage (including by sending more troops). Nation-building was in — especially for “Bush’s new Democratic allies.” Failure to rebuild Afghanistan would be a grave error. And Iraq was a mistake in part because it left the Afghan war “unfinished.” Apparently those arguments have become inoperative.

Why the volte-face? And why the frantic efforts to urge Obama to reject the recommendation by General Stanley McChrystal, who believes that without additional troops our mission in Afghanistan “will likely result in failure” and “risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.” Perhaps, as the great Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami has written, the “good war” of Afghanistan was “the club with which the Iraq war was battered.” Regardless of the reason, the inconsistency and inconstancy on Afghanistan by Dionne and his fellow liberals are both obvious and damning. They are reminding us, one more time, why they cannot be trusted on matters of national security.

Jay Nordlinger posts some responses he received about guns in America, from the people who cling to them.

A little more mail, based on my Impromptus today, and an earlier Corner post …

Jay,

I grew up in Baltimore City. In seventh grade (1965-ish), my parents allowed my brothers and me to take our .22 rifles on the transit bus to the end of the line, where we did some target practice and hunted for small animals in the woods. My mother was always a “free-range” mom — as the newly discovered parenting style is being called — so the fact that she was fine with us carrying guns cross-town on a bus is normal to me. What is strange to me now is that the Maryland Transit Authority was fine with it, too. As long as we showed the driver that the clip was out of the gun, he waved us by.

Another:

Jay,

A few years ago on Christmas morning while walking my little dogs, as I do every morning, I heard the noise of gunshots coming from several different directions. I live in a small town in Utah. It was then that I realized how fortunate I am to live here. Not for one minute did I think any violence or crime was being committed. You see, it was just folks trying out their new Christmas gifts by firing a few rounds off.

Many Americans would be amazed that such places exist, in America; many other Americans would be amazed at their countrymen’s amazement. …

It’s not enough Obama will lower the oceans, Investor’s Business Daily editors catch the White House suggesting the recent NY terror plot was unearthed by The One’s interest. Normally IBD editorials aren’t in the humor section, but this one belongs.

National Security: Intelligence officials say alleged terrorist plotter Najibullah Zazi was caught not thanks to domestic surveillance but by CIA tracking of al-Qaida. The White House says the president did it. …

…Zazi was reportedly tracked down through the CIA’s discovery of his communications with a high-level al-Qaida contact. But to hear the White House describe it, you’d think a satellite was transmitting real-time video to the Situation Room showing Zazi as he drove across the country.

“Senior officials added the case to Obama’s daily intelligence briefing in the Oval Office,” the Washington Post was told by presidential aides, after which “the case quickly piqued Obama’s curiosity and led to what aides called an intensive three-week White House focus on the case.”

What a juggling act: While pushing Congress for radical health reform, reneging on our commitment to the Poles and the Czechs on missile defense, pondering whether to take the advice of the general he appointed to run the war in Afghanistan, and horning into Israel’s domestic policies regarding settlements, the commander in chief managed to laser in on the Zazi case at a point when the professionals “had only fragmented information about Zazi.” …

Scott Adams has the details on an amusing terrorist scheme. If only all our enemies would use these enemas.

I assume that most of you have heard about the so-called Ass Bomber. He was a terrorist who tried to kill a Saudi Deputy Interior Minister by putting a bomb up his ass and detonating it when they met. Unfortunately for the terrorist, the bomb was only big enough to kill the Ass Bomber himself.

This raises many interesting questions. At the top of my list: Why did the Ass Bomber think that killing the Deputy Interior Minister was worth shoving a bomb up his own ass? Sure, I could see if it was the Interior Minister himself, but the deputy?

I think Saudi Arabia played this wrong. Instead of telling the state controlled media that the ASSassination attempt failed, they should have reported that the Deputy Interior Minister was dead, and so was everyone else in the building. And they should have said there was no way to stop this sort of brilliant attack. Within weeks, every member of Al Qaeada would have shoved a too-small bomb up his ass and detonated it in a market or mosque. The innocent bystanders would be startled and perhaps a little bit slimed, but otherwise unhurt. Terrorism would have a quick and amusing conclusion. …

Make sure to go to the cartoons to see a hilarious view of the world from demonbaby.com that reminds us of Saul Steinberg’s New Yorker covers.

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We start with three items on the economy.

Spengler takes a dim view of our short term economic prospects and presents an excellent step-by-step explanation of what we are seeing in the markets in reaction to the government’s foolish attempts to help. Below are the beginning and ending summaries.

President Barack Obama may be remembered for permanent depression, the way that Leon Trotsky’s name is linked with permanent revolution. Fiscal stimulus combined with near-zero interest rates have proven to be a toxic cocktail for the United States, the macroeconomic equivalent of barbiturates and alcohol. Keynesian spending creates a deficit that sucks all the available capital out of the grassroots economy and transfers it to the Treasury market. Easy funding terms from the Federal Reserve allow financial institutions to make money in government bonds while shutting off credit to the rest of the economy. It’s classic crowding out, in which the government’s misguided effort to spend its way out of recession pushes the productive economy deeper into the hole.  …

…The parallels between America in 2009 and Japan in 1989 are uncanny. An asset price bubble has collapsed, just before a tsunami of prospective retirements that the asset bubble was supposed to fund. Demand for savings is bottomless, and the government satisfies demands for savings by running a huge deficit and issuing debt. The crippled banking system borrows at an interest rate of zero and buys government securities. And the economy shrivels up and dies.

Japan, though, had one advantage: it knew how to export. There is only one way to drastically increase savings while maintaining full employment, and that is to export. America has neither the export capacity nor the customers. It could get them, but that is a different story. Francesco Sisci and I told it here US’s road to recovery runs through Beijing (Asia Times Online, November 15, 2008).

SeekingAlpha.com writes that despite the stock market gains, the economy does not appear to be recovering. The starting place for their analysis is heavy insider selling.

… For the latest week, ending October 1, 2009, insider selling to buying soared 44:1. Total insider buying was just $11.9MM for the week while insiders continued selling en masse – a staggering total of $532MM in selling. Perhaps most alarming is recent evidence from insiders themselves that confirm why they have been selling. …

…The recent Business Roundtable Survey results showed that 49% of all CEOs expect their sales to be flat or down in the coming 6 months. 51% expect an increase. 79% of all CEOs surveyed expect their capital spending to be flat or down in the coming 6 months. 87% of all CEOs expect to do no hiring in the coming 6 months…

…If you missed the recent interview with Ken Langone I highly recommend you take a few minutes and watch it in its entirety. Langone is an insider amongst insiders. Not only is he one of the co-founders of Home Depot (HD) (one of the companies at the heart of this economic downturn), but he is a board member at Yum! Brands, ChoicePoint, and former board member of the NYSE (NYX) and GE. In the interview Langone was brutally honest about the state of the recovery. Not only does he believe that the government is lying about the recovery, but he says the economy is actually getting worse:

“I’m confused. All of the people that I respect as investors and as people are all scratching their heads saying “we don’t get it”. All the businesses that I talk to – I spend a lot of my time now reaching out to people that are running companies, running businesses – I’m getting it back from everybody: it’s terrible, it’s getting worse, September was worse than August…I think this (rally) is a reflection of the fact that you get nothing in the way of rate of return in the bond market….”

The weekly rail data, weak retail sales, lack of revenue growth, extraordinary job losses and recent downturn in housing data all validate the actions taken by corporate insiders – the rally is not sustainable because the economy is not actually recovering…..

Robert Samuelson spends more time looking in the rear view mirror as he spins the tale of averting catastrophe. He talked with Christina Romer, who chairs the president’s Council of Economic Advisers. She says that government intervention averted a depression, but that the road to recovery is still unclear.

…The anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy in mid-September inspired much commentary that saving the investment bank wouldn’t have averted the crisis. Too many other lenders held bad loans. True. But allowing Lehman to fail almost certainly made the crisis worse. By creating more unknowns — which companies would be rescued, how much were “toxic” securities worth? — Lehman’s bankruptcy converted normal anxieties into extreme fears that triggered panic.

As credit markets froze, stock prices collapsed. By year-end, the Dow Jones industrial average was down 23 percent from its pre-Lehman level and 34 percent from a year earlier. Financial panic poisoned popular psychology. In September 2008, the Conference Board’s index of consumer confidence was 61.4. By February, it was 25.3. Shoppers recoiled from buying cars, appliances and other big-ticket items. Spending on such “durables” dropped at a 12 percent annual rate in 2008′s third quarter and at a 20 percent rate in the fourth. With a slight lag, businesses canned investment projects; that spending fell at a 20 percent rate in the fourth quarter and a 39 percent rate in 2009′s first quarter.

That these huge declines didn’t lead to depression mainly reflects, as Romer argues, countervailing government actions. Private markets for goods, services, labor and securities do mostly self-correct; but panic, driven by the acute fear of the unknown, feeds on itself and disarms these stabilizing tendencies. In this situation, only government can protect the economy as a whole, because most individuals and companies are involved in the self-defeating behavior of self-protection. …

Bobby Jindal, Louisiana governor who was Pickerhead’s first choice for McCain’s running mate has a WaPo Op-Ed on the conservative case for health care reform.

…So here are 10 ideas to increase the affordability and quality of health care. Some of these are buried within various Republican and Democratic plans that have been floated. They offer a path forward toward significant bipartisan reform. These proposals would require insurance companies to do their jobs and spread risk over large populations, restore patients’ power to make their own health-care decisions, and focus our system on quality instead of activity.

– Voluntary purchasing pools: Give individuals and small businesses the opportunities that large businesses and the government have to seek lower insurance costs.

– Portability: As people change jobs or move across state lines, they change insurance plans. By allowing consumers to “own” their policies, insurers would have incentive to make more investments in prevention and in managing chronic conditions. …

– Require coverage of preexisting conditions: Insurance should not be least accessible when it is needed most. Companies should be incentivized to focus on delivering high-quality effective care, not to avoid covering the sick.

– Transparency and payment reform: Consumers have more information when choosing a car or restaurant than when selecting a health-care provider. Provider quality and cost should be plainly available to consumers, and payment systems should be based on outcomes, not volume. Today’s system results in wide variations in treatment instead of the consistent application of best practices. We must reward efficiency and quality. …

WSJ editors explain why Cash for Clunkers did not help the economy.

Remember “cash for clunkers,” the program that subsidized Americans to the tune of nearly $3 billion to buy a new car and destroy an old one? Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood declared in August that, “This is the one stimulus program that seems to be working better than just about any other program.”

If that’s true, heaven help the other programs. Last week U.S. automakers reported that new car sales for September, the first month since the clunker program expired, sank by 25% from a year earlier. Sales at GM and Chrysler fell by 45% and 42%, respectively. Ford was down about 5%. Some 700,000 cars were sold in the summer under the program as buyers received up to $4,500 to buy a new car they would probably have purchased anyway, so all the program seems to have done is steal those sales from the future. Exactly as critics predicted. …

…The basic fallacy of cash for clunkers is that you can somehow create wealth by destroying existing assets that are still productive, in this case cars that still work. Under the program, auto dealers were required to destroy the car engines of trade-ins with a sodium silicate solution, then smash them and send them to the junk yard. As the journalist Henry Hazlitt wrote in his classic, “Economics in One Lesson,” you can’t raise living standards by breaking windows so some people can get jobs repairing them.

In the category of all-time dumb ideas, cash for clunkers rivals the New Deal brainstorm to slaughter pigs to raise pork prices. The people who really belong in the junk yard are the wizards in Washington who peddled this economic malarkey.

Jonah Goldberg defends Glenn Beck against liberal and conservative criticism.

…The conservative criticism has more bite. Many conservatives believe Beck is undermining conservatism with his often goofy style and his sometimes outlandish and paranoia-tinged diatribes. In an ode to conservatives such as William F. Buckley, my friend Charles Murray writes, “Don’t tell me that we have to put up with the Glenn Becks of the world to be successful. Within living memory, the right was successful. The right changed the country for the better — through good arguments made by fine men.” Murray is nostalgic for conservative leaders who were, like Murray himself, soft-spoken intellectuals.

There are problems with such nostalgia. First, there has always been a populist front on the right, even during the “glory days” when Buckley was saying he’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phonebook than the faculty at Harvard. Moreover, whatever Beck or Limbaugh’s faults, they are more cheerful — and more responsible — warriors than the populist right-wingers of yesteryear. The Tea Partiers may be rowdy and ideologically diffuse, but their goals — like Beck’s — are indisputably libertarian. And from a conservative perspective, popular libertarian uprisings should be preferable to the sort of statist populism so often celebrated on the left.

Most important, popularity is what the intellectuals were fighting for: to create a conservative culture (Americans describe themselves as conservative over liberal 2-1 ). By definition, making conservatism popular means making it less stuffy and intellectual and more accessible. Not only is Beck good at that, he actually gets people to read serious books in ways Buckley never could. Why defenestrate him from the house of conservatism merely to preserve the rarefied air?

Besides, why should conservatives support an unfair double standard? Liberals never see the antics of their more flamboyant celebrities as an indictment of liberalism itself. Perhaps it’s time conservatives adopted a more liberal standard.

In the LA Times, Thomas H. Maugh II reviews the studies, just published in Science, of a recently discovered ancestor of the human species, “Ardi.”

A treasure trove of 4.4-million-year-old fossils from the Ethiopian desert is dramatically overturning widely held ideas about the early evolution of humans and how they came to walk upright, even as it paints a remarkably detailed picture of early life in Africa, researchers reported Thursday.

The centerpiece of the diverse collection of primate, animal and plant fossils is the near-complete skeleton of a human ancestor that demonstrates our earliest forebears looked nothing like a chimpanzee or other large primate, as is now commonly believed. Instead, the findings suggest that the last common ancestor of humans and primates, which existed nearly 2 million years earlier, was a primitive creature that shared few traits with modern-day members of either group.

The findings, analyzed in a large group of studies published Thursday in the journal Science, also indicate that our ancestors began walking upright in woodlands, not on grassy savannas as prior generations of researchers had speculated.

The discovery of the specimen called Ardipithecus ramidus “is one of the most important discoveries for the study of human evolution,” said paleoanthropologist David Pilbeam of Harvard University, who was not involved in the research. “The find itself is extraordinary, as were the enormous labors that went into the reconstruction of a skeleton shattered almost beyond repair,” he said in an e-mailed statement. …

…”These fossils are much more important than Lucy,” the 3.2-million-year-old specimen of Australopithecus afarensis that was found in the Afar desert in the 1970s, said paleoanthropologist Alan Walker of Pennsylvania State University, who was not involved in the research. “The reason is that when Lucy was found, we already knew the major features of Australopithecus from fossils found in the 1940s. . . . These fossils are of a completely unknown creature, and are much stranger and more primitive than Australopithecus.” …

In the WSJ, Frans de Waal looks at one of the theories postulated by the discovery of “Ardi.” The fossil evidence suggests to some that apes as a family, including humans, had peaceful ancestors, and that the aggressive chimpanzees are the aberrant line of our genetic family.

Are humans hard-wired to be ruthlessly competitive or supportive of one another?

The behavior of our ape relatives, known as peaceful vegetarians, once bolstered the view that our actions could not be traced to an impulse to dominate. But in the late 1970s, when chimpanzees were discovered to hunt monkeys and kill each other, they became the poster boys for our violent origins and aggressive instinct. …

…Doubts about this macho origin myth have been on the rise, however, culminating in the announcement this past week of the discovery of a fossil of a 4.4 million year old ancestor that may have been gentler than previously thought. Considered close to the last common ancestor of apes and humans, this ancestral type, named Ardipithecus ramidus (or “Ardi”), had a less protruding mouth equipped with considerably smaller, blunter canine teeth than the chimpanzee’s impressive fangs. This ape’s canines serve as deadly knives, capable of slashing open an enemy’s face and skin, causing either a quick death through blood loss or a slow one through festering infections. Wild chimps have been observed to use this weaponry to lethal effect in territorial combat. But the aggressiveness of chimpanzees obviously loses some of its significance if our ancestors were built quite differently. What if chimps are outliers in an otherwise relatively peaceful lineage?

Consider our other close relatives: gorillas and bonobos. Gorillas are known as gentle giants with a close-knit family life: they rarely kill. Even more striking is the bonobo, which is just as genetically close to us as the chimp. No bonobo has ever been observed to eliminate its own kind, neither in the wild nor in captivity. This slightly built, elegant ape seems to enjoy love and peace to a degree that would put any Woodstock veteran to shame. Bonobos have sometimes been presented as a delightful yet irrelevant side branch of our family tree, but what if they are more representative of our primate background than the blustering chimpanzee? …

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Marty Peretz continues to see things more clearly.

… So this question arises: If Obama could not get Chicago over the finish line in Copenhagen, which was a test only of his charms, how will he persuade Tehran to give up its nuclear weapons capacity or the Arabs, to whom he has tilted (we are told) only tactically, to sit down without their 60 year-old map as guide to what they demand from Israel.

What I suspect is that the president is probably a clinical narcissist. This is not necessarily a bad condition if one maintains for oneself what the psychiatrists call an “optimal margin of illusion,” that is, the margin of hope that allows you to work. But what if his narcissism blinds him to the issues and problems in the world and the inveterate foes of the nation that are not susceptible to his charms?

Chicago will survive its disappointments and Obama will, as well. It is the other stage sets on which the president struts–like he strutted in Cairo and at the United Nations–that concern me.

I know that the president believes himself a good man. My nervy query to him is: “Does he believe America to be a good country?”

Jennifer Rubin asks some questions about Honduras policy.

… Once again we’re left wondering: What was the Obama team thinking? It’s not as if Zelaya’s relationship with Chavez was a secret or that Chavez’s record was unknown. The Obama administration didn’t get ambushed here. No, it willfully ignored inconvenient facts and applicable history as it pursued with a singular focus its effort to atone for alleged past American sins in the region and ensure that Chavez didn’t have cause to complain about the president—who likes very much to be liked by those who don’t like America. …

WSJ Op-Ed on how the teacher’s unions lost the media.

Quick: Which newspaper in recent editorials called teachers unions “indefensible” and a barrier to reform? You’d be excused for guessing one of the conservative outlets, but it was that bastion of liberalism, the New York Times. A month ago, The New Yorker—yes, The New Yorker—published a scathing piece on the problems with New York City’s “rubber room,” a union-negotiated arrangement that lets incompetent teachers while away the day at full salary while doing nothing. The piece quoted a principal saying that union leader Randi Weingarten “would protect a dead body in the classroom.”

Things only got worse for the unions this past week. A Washington Post editorial about charter schools carried this sarcastic headline: “Poor children learn. Teachers unions are not pleased.” And the Times weighed in again Monday, calling a national teachers union “aggressively hidebound.”

In recent months, the press has not merely been harsh on unions—it has championed some controversial school reformers. Washington’s schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, who won’t win any popularity contests among teachers, enjoys unwavering support from the Post editorial page for her plans to institute merit pay and abolish tenure. …

More National Review shorts.

Since 1991, every president has met with the Dalai Lama, every time the Dalai Lama has traveled to Washington. That means Bush 41, Clinton, and Bush 43. The Dalai Lama is traveling to Washington this month (October). But President Obama has said no. He is going to China in November, and is not willing to upset Beijing, by receiving the Dalai Lama, until after that trip. He argues that a “strong” U.S.-China relationship can only help the Tibetans. Some supporters of Tibet are grumbling about “appeasement.” They wonder what Obama will have to show for his solicitousness of China. We wonder too. We also note that Obama fears not to offend China by slapping arbitrary tariffs on its goods while fearing to offend China by receiving one of the more admirable men on the planet, speaking for one of the more persecuted peoples on the planet. Maybe Big Labor should adopt the Tibetan cause? …

George Will columns on parts of the climate change debate, and we use that to kick off a few items on current climate controversies. The pieces that follow are better organized than Will’s.

… America needs a national commission appointed to assess the evidence about climate change. Alarmists will fight this because the first casualty would be the carefully cultivated and media-reinforced myth of consensus — the bald assertion that no reputable scientist doubts the gravity of the crisis, doubts being conclusive evidence of disreputable motives or intellectual qualifications. The president, however, could support such a commission because he is sure “there’s finally widespread recognition of the urgency of the challenge before us.” So he announced last week at the U.N. climate change summit, where he said the threat is so “serious” and “urgent” that unless all nations act “boldly, swiftly and together” — “time . . . is running out” — we risk “irreversible catastrophe.” Prince Charles agrees. In March, seven months ago, he said humanity had 100 months — until July 2017 — to prevent “catastrophic climate change and the unimaginable horrors that this would bring.” …

Ronald Bailey in American.Com reports on our “uncrowded” planet. Seriously! For years Pickerhead has been fond of saying that everyone in the world, in families of four, on quarter acre lots could live in Alaska. Everyone. All 6.8 billion. Alaska has a land area of 663,248 square miles, making 424 million acres, providing 1,697 billion quarter acre lots to hold 1,700 billion families. OK we’re a little shy, but you get the idea. Everybody in the world living in Alaska. Now you know why the country looks a little empty when you fly coast to coast.

Every so often, the overpopulation meme erupts into public discourse and imminent doom is declared again. A particularly overwrought example of the overpopulation meme and its alleged problems appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch in a piece by regular financial columnist Paul B. Farrell.

Farrell asserts that overpopulation is “the biggest time-bomb for Obama, America, capitalism, the world.” Bigger than global warming, poverty, or peak oil. Overpopulation will end capitalism and maybe even destroy modern civilization. As evidence, Farrell cites what he calls neo-Malthusian biologist Jared Diamond’s 12-factor equation of population doom.

It turns out that Farrell is wrong or misleading about the environmental and human effects of all 12 factors he cites. Let’s take them one by one. …

Speaking of idiot doomsayers, John Tierney writes some more on Obama’s science czar, John Holdren.

As a long-time student of John P. Holdren’s gloomy visions of the future, like his warnings about global famines and resource shortages, I can’t resist passing along another one that has just been dug up. This one was made in 1971, long before Dr. Holdren came President Obama’s science adviser, in an essay just unearthed by zombietime (a blog that has been republishing excerpts of his past writings). In the 1971 essay, “Overpopulation and the Potential for Ecocide,” Dr. Holdren and his co-author, the ecologist Paul Ehrlich, warned of a coming ice age.

They certainly weren’t the only scientists in the 1970s to warn of a coming ice age, but I can’t think of any others who were so creative in their catastrophizing. …

The humor section starts with a great post from NewsBusters which outlines the NY Times efforts to whitewash the Denmark Debacle.

… I should also note that a supposedly heroic Michelle Obama quote in the original (“‘Take no prisoners,’ she vowed”) also got the memory-hole treatment.

The change in the dateline location is important to the point of this post. The Washington story is not an hours-later update of an older story; the location change means that it is a new story. Yet it carries the same URL as the older one out of Copenhagen (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/03/sports/03obama.html). There is no journalistically defensible reason for deleting the Copenhagen-based story. Yet it has indeed disappeared. Times searches on word strings deleted from the older item come up empty.

As if the Times needed any more blows to its allegedly still-existing journalistic integrity, this one can’t help but beg the question of who at the White House put pressure on the Times to do what it did. Why would any journalist put themselves in the position of making people wonder if they bow to the wishes of the politically powerful? The answer may be that journalism, once thought to be at least lurking occasionally in its Manhattan hallways, is officially dead at the New York Times.

NY Times admits its readers are in the dark. Scott Johnson from Power Line has the story.

… Here’s an example, from Leigh Allen of San Francisco, who said she relies on The Times to keep her informed: “I often don’t hear about the latest conflict until I read a Facebook rant from an old high school friend or talk on the phone with my mother (both in conservative Orange County, Calif.). It’s embarrassing not to be able to respond with facts when I hadn’t even heard about the issue.” Michele Cusack of Novato, Calif., said that when someone asked if she had heard the latest about Acorn, “I had to answer ‘no’ because I get all my news from The New York Times.” …

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Elliott Abrams notes that we have seen this type of disastrous foreign policy before, but reminds us that the American people see things differently than the White House.

The appearance in Washington last week of Iran’s foreign minister, while the blood is not yet dry from his government’s continuing suppression of student protests, is a reminder of the disastrous foreign policy path the Obama administration has chosen. Not so long ago, proponents of a stronger U.S. foreign policy faced a similar policy of weakness and accommodation. The 1970s saw some pretty dark days of “détente”–when Gerald Ford refused to see Alexander Solzhenitsyn; when the United States allowed Cuban troops to flow into Angola; and when, in the single year of 1979, Jimmy Carter watched a small band of would-be commies take Grenada, the Sandinistas take Nicaragua, and the Soviets go into Afghanistan–not to mention the shah’s fall and the Ayatollah Khomeini’s takeover of Iran.

One begins to wonder how far we will drift into a new period of generalized disaster. In Honduras, we back the Hugo Chávez acolyte and say we won’t respect November’s free elections. In Israel, we latch on to the bizarre theory that settlement growth is the key obstacle to Middle East peace and try to bludgeon a newly elected prime minister into a freeze that is politically impossible–and also useless in actually achieving a peace settlement. In Eastern Europe, we discard a missile defense agreement with Poland and the Czechs and leave them convinced we do not mean to fight off Russian hegemony in the former Soviet sphere.

Manouchehr Mottaki, foreign minister of Iran, visited Washington, as noted, after such visits had been forbidden for a decade. High-ranking American officials have made six visits to Syria, even while the government of Iraq and our commanding general there complain of Syrian support for murderous jihadists. The highest ranking U.S. official to visit Cuba in decades recently toured Castro’s tropical paradise. The president won’t see the Dalai Lama, however, for fear of offending the Chinese. …

…And that’s the final lesson, of Reagan as well as Scoop Jackson: Be of good cheer. No whining, no nasty personal attacks. It’s a political mistake, it’s unattractive, it’s self-defeating, and it’s unwarranted. The American people think our country is indeed “defined by our differences” with murderous Islamist groups and repressive regimes. They don’t agree that our “interests are shared” with such groups, and they believe friends deserve better treatment than enemies. We’re on the American people’s side, and they’re on ours in this struggle over our country’s relations with the world.

Today it’s Dana Milbank’s turn to be the media guy who turns on the new administration.

Helen Thomas is 89 years old and requires some assistance to get to and from the daily White House briefing. Yet her backbone has proved stronger than that of the president she covers.

On Thursday afternoon, Thomas gave a clinic in fortitude to President Obama’s spokesman, Robert Gibbs, during the briefing. “Has the president given up on the public option?” she inquired from her front-row-middle seat.

The press secretary laughed at this repetition of a common Thomas inquiry, but this questioner, who has covered every president since Kennedy, wasn’t about to be silenced. “I ask it day after day because it has great meaning in this country, and you never answer it,” she said. …

…”You’re not going to get it,” she advised.

“Then why do you keep asking me?” Gibbs inquired.

“Because I want your conscience to bother you,” Thomas replied. The room erupted; Gibbs reddened.

Actually, conscience isn’t the problem for Gibbs and his boss; it’s spine. Thomas’s question got at an Obama administration trait that is puzzling opponents and demoralizing supporters: Why isn’t the president more decisive and forceful? On many of the most pressing issues — the public option in health reform, troop levels in Afghanistan, sanctions against Iran — the administration has hewed to hemming and hawing. …

Frank Rich too. Lisa Schiffren posts at the Corner.

…And then I read Frank Rich’s column in today’s New York Times. I despise pretty much everything political I have ever read by Rich. He very sincerely seems to believe that weakness is powerful, that the U.S. should not win any conflicts, that there is no honest conservatism, only hatred of the world’s have-nots. Normally I don’t read him, but there the column was, posted on my favorite aggregator site. And whoa. What a column. Read it here.

Barack Obama promised a change from this revolving-door, behind-closed-doors collaboration between special interests and government. He vowed to “do our business in the light of day” — with health care negotiations broadcast on C-Span — and to “restore the vital trust between people and their government.” He said, “I intend to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over.” That those lobbyists would so extravagantly flaunt their undiminished role shows just how little they believe that a new sheriff has arrived in Dodge. . . .

Obama’s promise to make Americans trust the government again was not just another campaign bullet point; it’s the foundation of his brand of governance and essential to his success in office. At the first anniversary of the TARP bailout of the banks, we can see how far he has to go. Americans’ continued suspicion that Washington is in cahoots with powerful interests . . . is contributing to their confusion and skepticism about what’s happening out of view in the battle over health care reform.

The public is not wrong. The administration’s legislative deals with the pharmaceutical companies were made in back rooms. Business Week reported in early August that the UnitedHealth Group and its fellow insurance giants had already quietly rounded up moderate Democrats in the House to block any public health care option that would compete with them for business. …

…Got it? Frank Rich, of all people, concludes that ”the public is not wrong” to mistrust the intentions of an administration that wishes to revamp one-sixth of the economy, given the attendant realities, including serious corruption. This is actual progress in the debate, even if it doesn’t quite get to the libertarian understanding that when government controls the economy, precisely that sort of corruption is inevitable — even if the new president was serious about stopping it. Bravo, Frank.

There’s plenty of Olympicfreude to fill up a couple of days of Pickings. We’ll indulge ourselves with Jennifer Rubin.

As the media and political observers pick over the remains of the failed Olympics-bid debacle, the debate has boiled down to this: Will it be a temporary embarrassment for the president or a long-term problem, an emblem of overreach and underachievement? There is more to this than simply predicting the toll it will take on Obama. Both the rebuff and the Obama team’s stunned reaction have stripped the veneer from the Obama mystique. Suddenly, the entire country realizes that that there is no “master plan” behind what Obama does. In fact, there may be no plan at all….

…Could it be that there is less to Obama and his team of geniuses than we were led to believe? Maybe Obama’s domestic and foreign-policy agenda is all based on wishful thinking: a cost-neutral health-care plan will emerge from Congress, talks with Iran will produce results, sweet-talking the Russian bear will pan out, there is some magic pill to achieve victory in Afghanistan that has escaped the nation’s leading counterinsurgency gurus, and private-sector jobs will return despite the anti-employer policies flowing from Washington. …

…The IOU rebuff may turn out to be Obama’s man-behind-the-curtain moment, straight out of the Wizard of Oz. It may be that the whole Hope and Change routine has been little more than a lot of cheesy special effects—and a cynical game to convince the public that the great and powerful leader really is worthy of awe.

The people are finally figuring out the act.

Mark Steyn says that federal health care will be as good as federal bridge-building.

…Health care isn’t really that complicated, not for you and your dependents. To be sure, if you need a particular operation or course of treatment, it can require a four- or five-figure sum. But, in the course of his life, the average American makes many four-, five-, and even six-figure purchases: They’re called, just to cite the obvious examples, cars and homes. Very few of us stroll into the realtor’s with an attaché case containing a quarter-million dollars in small bills. Yet, remarkably, most of us manage to arrange the acquisition of houses and automobiles without routing the transaction through some vast federal bureaucracy. If you attempt to design a system for hundreds of millions of people, it’s bound to be complicated. Ask your nearest Soviet commissar, whose five-year plans we now seem to be emulating in both their boundless optimism and their entirely predictable consequences.

A few weeks back I mentioned a couple of bridges in a neighboring town of mine, both on dirt roads serving maybe a dozen houses. Bridge A: The town was prevailed upon to apply for some state/town 80/20 funding plan, which morphed under the stimulus into some fed/state 60/40 funding plan. Current estimated cost: $655,000. The town’s on the hook for 20 percent of the state’s 40 percent — or $52,400. There’s no estimated year of completion, or even of commencement, and the temporary bridge the town threw up has worn out.

Bridge B: Following their experience with Bridge A, the town replaced this one themselves, in a matter of weeks. Total cost: $30,000.

Government is simple provided two conditions are met: You do it locally, and you do it without unions. …

…Building a bridge is easy and affordable: America’s settlers did it all the time. What makes it complex and unaffordable is statism. A couple of seasons back, the preferred shorthand for government waste was “Bridge to Nowhere.” In fact, the bridge leads somewhere quite specific, and, if you don’t like where it’s headed, you’d better do something about it before we’re any farther across the river.

Veronique de Rugy looks at the growing federal deficit.

The Bush-era deficits were bad. I know. I spent eight years complaining about the president’s lack of fiscal responsibly (here and here for instance). I even wrote that Republicans during Bush’s time in office made French socialists look like Reagan. However, President Obama’s new projected deficits are truly frightening. And the worse part: we haven’t seen it all yet. …

…First, while President Obama is fond of promoting what he calls a “new ethic of responsibility”—in fact he named his first budget, for fiscal 2010, “A New Era of Responsibility”—that is a misrepresentation of his actual budget plan. For each of Obama’s years in office, the deficit is projected to be larger than any year during Bush’s terms.

Second, Obama is right to note that he inherited a large deficit in fiscal 2009. But as we can see here, he is responsible for growing the deficit beyond expectations in fiscal 2009 and thereafter. In fact, in its January 2009 projections, the CBO built in most of the Bush-era policy spending, including the TARP bailout (which President Obama voted for as a senator) and the takeovers of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In spite of his rhetoric, President Obama bears most of the responsibility for the red part of the bar in fiscal 2009, which includes, among other things, some auto bailouts and $31 billion of additional funding for the omnibus bill, the share of the stimulus funding spent in that fiscal year.

Third, Obama’s deficits are frightening but they promise to get worse. Each month that goes by the president adds spending to the deficit. The August 2009 projections for instance, do not include any of the president’s healthcare reform spending and they assume that the “temporary” stimulus spending will not be prolonged past fiscal 2011. Finally, they also assume that the economy will recover soon and that it will grow enough to generate increasing tax revenue, in spite of the president’s plan to impose new taxes and regulations on the private sector. In other words, the deficit will likely continue to deteriorate beyond the current projections. …

We have National Review shorts today. Here are two:

Chief Justice John Roberts was taking questions from students at the University of Michigan Law School. Someone asked him whether too many justices come from elite schools. Roberts, a graduate of Harvard College and Law School, said no: “Some went to Yale.”

The peak of William Safire’s early career is a twice-told tale, but it deserves one more telling: As a 29-year-old PR man, he lured Vice President Richard Nixon and Premier Nikita Khrushchev to an exhibit of a “typical American house” that he was tending in Moscow, then snapped them debating the merits of capitalism. The photo made instant history; the haunch-faced bureaucrat at Nixon’s side was a young Leonid Brezhnev. Safire wrote speeches for Nixon and Spiro Agnew, then in 1973 began a twice-weekly column for the New York Times. They billed him as their conservative voice, which he wasn’t, quite: Safire was an anti-Communist liberal Republican. He had a sprightly style, a big bag of tricks (year-end predictions, first-person forays into leaders’ thoughts), and a willingness to work the phones and to chase down malefactors of every stripe, including liberal Democrats. He was missed when he retired in 2005; is missed now that he has died, age 79. R.I.P.

The Economist reports on an amazing advancement in the field of medicine.

DIALYSIS is not as bad as dying, but it is pretty unpleasant, nonetheless. It involves being hooked up to a huge machine, three times a week, in order to have your blood cleansed of waste that would normally be voided, via the kidneys, as urine. To make matters worse, three times a week does not appear to be enough. Research now suggests that daily dialysis is better. But who wants to tied to a machine—often in a hospital or a clinic—for hours every day for the rest of his life?

Victor Gura, of the University of California, Los Angeles, hopes to solve this problem with an invention that is now undergoing clinical trials. By going back to basics, he has come up with a completely new sort of dialyser—one you can wear. …

William Amelia in the WSJ, writes about the author and the story that brought the short story to Russian literature.

In his short, tormented life, the Russian novelist Nikolai Vassilyevich Gogol (1809-1852) managed to write for the ages. His oeuvre is huge. Among the familiar masterworks are “Dead Souls,” the first great epic Russian novel; “The Inspector General,” a dramatic success; and volumes of Ukrainian and Petersburg tales, rich in folklore and culture with a froth of the supernatural. He is regarded as one of the major influences in the development of realism in Russian literature.

But it is “The Overcoat,” the last story that Gogol wrote—perhaps his finest and most famous—that particularly characterizes his legacy. It is a remarkable piece of literary art, displaying Gogol’s gift of caricature and imaginative invention. With “The Overcoat,” Gogol introduced the short story as a literary form in Russia, providing a new model for other writers of the time. No one said it better than Dostoevsky: “We all came out of Gogol’s overcoat.” …

…Vladimir Nabokov allowed that the real Gogol was found only in “The Overcoat.” “When he tried to write in the Russian tradition,” Nabokov said, “he lost all trace of talent. But in the immortal ‘The Overcoat’ he let himself go and became the greatest artist that Russia has yet produced.”

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Charles Krauthammer gives us the back story on Sarkozy’s response to Obama’s speech on nuclear disarmament at the UN. Sarkozy was also sending a pointed message to Obama for holding back on the Qom news. Sarkozy’s comments were posted by Maura Flynn on BigGovernment.com, which Pickings carried on September 28th.

…Confusing ends and means, the Obama administration strives mightily for shows of allied unity, good feeling and pious concern about Iran’s nuclear program — whereas the real objective is stopping that program. This feel-good posturing is worse than useless, because all the time spent achieving gestures is precious time granted Iran to finish its race to acquire the bomb.

Don’t take it from me. Take it from Sarkozy, who could not conceal his astonishment at Obama’s naivete. On Sept. 24, Obama ostentatiously presided over the Security Council. With 14 heads of state (or government) at the table, with an American president at the chair for the first time ever, with every news camera in the world trained on the meeting, it would garner unprecedented worldwide attention.

Unknown to the world, Obama had in his pocket explosive revelations about an illegal uranium enrichment facility that the Iranians had been hiding near Qom. The French and the British were urging him to use this most dramatic of settings to stun the world with the revelation and to call for immediate action.

Obama refused. Not only did he say nothing about it, but, reports the Wall Street Journal (citing Le Monde), Sarkozy was forced to scrap the Qom section of his speech. Obama held the news until a day later — in Pittsburgh. I’ve got nothing against Pittsburgh (site of the G-20 summit), but a stacked-with-world-leaders Security Council chamber it is not.

Why forgo the opportunity? …

… ”The administration told the French,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “that it didn’t want to ‘spoil the image of success’ for Mr. Obama’s debut at the U.N.” …

Jennifer Rubin also looks at the Sarkozy speech and says the speech is a blueprint for conservatives to spur the White House to action based on reality.

…Sarkozy’s speech is a finely constructed argument against Obama’s open-ended scheme of negotiations and willful ignorance about the events that are unfolding. For conservatives, it provides the necessary building blocks for an alternative foreign policy. Obama has his eyes on the distant horizon; conservatives should urge us to see what’s happening in front of our eyes. Obama would rather skip over inconvenient facts and unhelpful history; conservatives should highlight them and extract relevant lessons. Obama is wary of employing leverage or defining his position; conservatives should insist he do both. And while Obama appeals to some mythical “international community” (as if there actually existed a world composed of nations that shared the same values and aspirations), conservatives would do well to point out that other nations in the world as it is (replete with bad actors and nervous allies) are watching Obama, evaluating his conduct, and making assessments about their own conduct.

The question remains: Will the West follow Sarkozy’s worldview, or Obama’s? Those concerned about a nuclear-armed Iran and a regional nuclear-arms race had better hope it is the former.

David Warren compares Obama and Gorbachev, as two leaders presiding over nations in trouble.

…Yet they do have one major thing in common, and that is the belief that, regardless of what the ruler does, the polity he rules must necessarily continue. This is perhaps the most essential, if seldom acknowledged, insight of the post-modern “liberal” mind: that if you take the pillars away, the roof will continue to hover in the air.

Gorbachev seemed to assume, right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall and then beyond it, that his Communist Party would recover from any temporary setbacks, and that the long-term effects of his glasnost and perestroika could only be to make it bigger and stronger.

There is a corollary of this largely unspoken assumption: that no matter what you do to one part of a machine, the rest of the machine will continue to function normally.

A variant of this is the frequently expressed denial of the law of unintended consequences: the belief that, if the effect you intend is good, the actual effect must be similarly happy.

Very small children, the mad, and certain extinct primitive tribes, have shared in this belief system, but only the fully college-educated liberal has the vocabulary to make it sound plausible.

With an incredible rapidity, America’s status as the world’s pre-eminent superpower is now passing away. This is a function both of the nearly systematic abandonment of U.S. interests and allies overseas, with metastasizing debt and bureaucracy on the home front.

And while I think the U.S. has the structural fortitude to survive the Obama presidency, it will be a much-diminished country that emerges from the “new physics” of hope and change.

Last week three certifiable liberals turned on Obama. Today we have two more; Martin Peretz and Margaret Carlson.

Martin Peretz reports on Hillary’s efforts to protect women, and notes that there are many women in Afghanistan that need our protection.

Hillary Clinton has become the president’s secretary for women’s affairs, and she’s done a good job at it–within the severe limits of what realistically can be done to protect females from sexual violence in war zones.  On Wednesday, the U.N. Security Council met, with Hillary in the chair, and as the Associated Press put it, “adopted a resolution … condemning sexual violence in war zones.”  The resolution passed unanimously which is always a bad sign because it signals inadequate measures, which are the only ones that will get support from the five permanent members.

Mrs, Clinton appealed “for global action to end the scourge.”  The council created a “special envoy” (my, how many special envoys there are around the world) to combat the use of rape as a weapon of way. The resolution also mandates the U.N. secretary general “to dispatch a team of experts to advise governments on how best to prosecute offenders.”

Clinton told the council:

It is time for all of us to assume our responsibility to go beyond condemning this behavior to taking concrete steps to end it, to make it socially unacceptable, to recognize it is not cultural, it is criminal … We must act now to end this crisis. …

…PS:  In the meantime, while the president and his secretary of state are worrying about women, there is one decision to be made at the White House that will affect the very lives and dignity of more than 14 million women.  It is the decision over Afghanistan where we–that is, our soldiers and the soldiers of our NATO–have freed millions of Afghan women from a humiliating form of degradation and slavery.  Their fates are also at stake in the issue of whether we stay and fight or not.  But almost nobody has them in the equation.

Margaret Carlson, in Bloomberg News, compares Obama’s trip to the IOC meeting with Nero’s fiddling.

Most of the time those complaining that President Barack Obama is doing too much really wish that he were doing nothing at all. It’s not that he is spreading himself too thin but that he is spreading himself too wide — over health care, executive bonuses and kid’s homework, while pandering to dictators at the United Nations. …

…I rarely have common ground with Republican Senator Kit Bond of Missouri. … Still, Bond has a point when he says “it’s baffling that the president has time to travel to Copenhagen, to be on ‘Letterman’ and every channel except the Food Network, and, yet, he doesn’t have time to talk with and listen to his top general.” …

…Let’s hope General Stanley McChrystal, the commander in Afghanistan, wasn’t hoping for a meeting tomorrow. That’s when Obama will be busy upstaging Brazil’s soccer star Pele and Japan’s Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama. According to Bond, who is keeping track, it’s been more than two months since the president had the kind of face time with McChrystal that he’s giving the International Olympic Committee. …

Andrew Stuttaford has a clever post on the Corner.

Chicago is a fine city and a place that I always enjoy visiting. It deserves better than to have the Olympics foisted upon it. What I cannot understand is why President Obama is joining in with the effort to bring this scourge to his home town. The Olympics after all, is a festival of bureaucratic arrogance, financial irresponsibility, internationalist vacuity, and politically correct blather.

Oh . . .

The Boston Globe editors think Obama should have left the IOC well enough alone.

Acting as if he were head of the Chicago chamber of commerce, not the leader of the United States, President Obama is traveling hat in hand to meet with the International Olympic Committee in Copenhagen today. He’s pushing for his hometown to host the 2016 Games. In case the judges aren’t dazzled by him and his wife, Michelle, he’s got Oprah Winfrey to help seal the deal. Chicago has much to gain from the Olympics, and no doubt all Americans would love to see the Games on US soil. Obama may help deliver the prize. But he risks diminishing the prestige of his office by mobilizing it behind this narrow cause. And it seems at least possible that some judges will feel so put off by his hard sell that they’ll opt for one of the other finalists.

Obama gained support during the presidential campaign by staying cool amid an economic meltdown, while John McCain marched into Washington in an attempt to show a spirit of action. Instead, McCain showed his futility. Americans don’t like to see their leaders appearing rash or weak. If the Olympic committee rejects the president, Obama becomes just another failed salesman. It’s a mistake for him to sink so much into a cause that may not even need his help. He should have stayed home.

In The National Journal, Stuart Taylor believes that specialized health courts would have better results than tort reform.

…Other states encourage doctors to admit errors, apologize, and offer out-of-court settlements, without fear that such actions will be used against them in court. Some scholars propose tying early offers and settlements to limits on contingent legal fees, with less work for the lawyers to do. These are good ideas — but again, they provide no remedies for groundless claims or defensive medicine.

The most promising proposal is to send malpractice suits to new, specialized health courts that have expert judges and no juries. By efficiently separating valid from invalid claims, health courts could award malpractice victims more-timely, more-certain compensation, with far lower legal and administrative costs.

Health courts would also better protect blameless doctors and thus reduce defensive medicine. By issuing written opinions consistently enforcing reasonable standards of care, they could enable doctors to safely forgo medically unnecessary tests and other interventions.

The health court idea has been championed by the Harvard School of Public Health and by Common Good, a law-reform group headed by Howard. Supporters include consumer groups such as AARP as well as medical organizations and political leaders ranging from former Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J., to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga.

The trial lawyer’s lobby and its allies hate the idea. They see juries as an essential safeguard for victims of negligent conduct. Although there is some truth to this view, juries lack the expertise to evaluate complex medical judgments, especially when the plaintiffs are severely injured and the doctors are not to blame. In addition, different juries apply wildly inconsistent standards in different cases, and they are not asked to explain their reasoning. …

Even though it was fought in the 19th Century, the American Civil War was the opening event in 20th Century warfare. The Economist reviews The American Civil War: A Military History by John Keegan, looking at how previous European wars influenced the US, and how the Civil War influenced future European wars.

A British military historian, even one as distinguished as Sir John Keegan, is hard put to say something new about America’s civil war. Fine American scholars, such as Bruce Catton, Shelby Foote and James McPherson, have explored every inch of its blood-sodden battlefields. Sir John’s achievement is to bring an international perspective to a conflict which, in the number of casualties in relation to population, “bears comparison only with the European losses in the Great War and Russia’s in the Second World War.”

In the 1860s the French army was regarded as supreme by the staff at the American military college at West Point and both sides in the war respected French generalship. Napoleon’s crushing victories at Austerlitz and Jena influenced the South’s Robert E. Lee as he aspired to end the war with a climactic Napoleonic battle. The North’s George McClellan was inspired by the Anglo-French campaign on the Black Sea in the Crimean war (1853-56) when he mounted an amphibious assault on Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy. …

…As well as looking back at European influences, Sir John looks forward to how the civil war changed European warfare. Relatively primitive trench warfare on the Confederacy’s northern front in Virginia presaged the slaughter of trench warfare on the Somme and at Passchendaele. General William Tecumseh Sherman’s spoliation of Georgia and the Carolinas “inaugurated a style of warfare that boded the worst sort of ill for peoples unable to keep a conqueror at bay, as Hitler’s campaigns in eastern Europe 75 years later would testify.” …

…As a Southern gentleman, Robert E. Lee is seen by Sir John as peerless, though not as a general, where he rates him inferior to his Unionist counterpart, Ulysses Grant. He praises Lee for his purity of character and describes him as a devout Christian and noble soldier who spared his reunited country the horrors of protracted guerrilla warfare when he accepted defeat with grace. But it was Sherman, not Lee, who set the pattern for modern warfare

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We are long again at the end of the week. Partly because of a large humor section which includes Mark Steyn, P. J. O’Rourke, Dilbert, and Scrappleface. And the cartoonists went crazy with the trip to Copenhagen while so many other things call for attention.

Thomas Sowell on all the smart people in DC.

Many people, including some conservatives, have been very impressed with how brainy the president and his advisers are. But that is not quite as reassuring as it might seem.

It was, after all, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brilliant “brains trust” advisers whose policies are now increasingly recognized as having prolonged the Great Depression of the 1930s, while claiming credit for ending it. The Great Depression ended only when the Second World War put an end to many New Deal policies. …

… Even in a country which suffered none of the wartime destruction that others suffered in the 20th century, Argentina began that century as one of the 10 richest nations in the world— ahead of France and Germany— and ended it as such an economic disaster that no one would even compare it to France or Germany.

Politically brilliant and charismatic leaders, promoting reckless government spending— of whom Juan Peron was the most prominent, but by no means alone— managed to create an economic disaster in a country with an abundance of natural resources and a country that was spared the stresses that wars inflicted on other nations in the 20th century.

Someone recently pointed out how much Barack Obama’s style and strategies resemble those of Latin American charismatic despots— the takeover of industries by demagogues who never ran a business, the rousing rhetoric of resentment addressed to the masses and the personal cult of the leader promoted by the media. But do we want to become the world’s largest banana republic?

The One doesn’t have enough to do, so he and his Education Secretary, the one who left Chicago with a 40% dropout rate, have decided our kids don’t go to school enough. David Harsanyi has thoughts.

Children can be irritating — especially your children. This is why the notion of a school year extending 12 months is not completely revolting. But, alas, the government is not a babysitting service. Not yet. Hopefully, not ever.

In the midst of grappling with a scattering of thorny issues, President Barack Obama took time to lend a fatherly hand this week. Your little Jake, it seems, doesn’t spend enough time under the gaze of the state. As it turns out, Jake is at a tragic disadvantage when competing against Yuri from Kazakhstan.

If you believe this tale, the administration has an answer for you: Kill summer vacation and add a few hours to the school day. “Young people in other countries are going to school 25, 30 percent longer than our students here,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan claimed. “I want to just level the playing field.”  …

… the president’s advice would hold more weight if he started sending his own children to public schools before mandating that your child be stuck in one during his or her God-given summer vacation.

John Fund with interesting  background on Sarah Palin’s upcoming blockbuster book.

… The book, which will be published on November 17, was a crash project. Ms. Palin actually moved temporarily to San Diego after she resigned the governorship in July so she could be close to her collaborator, Lynn Vincent. I bumped into Ms. Vincent, a former editor at the Christian-oriented World magazine, in New York a few weeks ago, where she had parked herself in a hotel close to the offices of HarperCollins while working on the book’s final edits.

Ms. Vincent didn’t reveal any details about the book, but did acknowledge it will describe Ms. Palin’s frustration over her treatment by the staffers she inherited from the McCain campaign after her surprise pick as the GOP vice presidential nominee last year. Ms. Palin was booked on grueling interviews with hostile reporters while talk-show hosts such as Glenn Beck couldn’t even get through to her aides. Mr. Beck tells me he was stunned when he picked up the phone one day just before the election to discover Sarah Palin was on the other end of the line. “She explained that she had been blocked from reaching her audience, so she was now ‘going rogue’ and booking her own interviews,” Mr. Beck told me. “I was thrilled she had burst out of the cage they’d built for her and we were finally talking.” …

This is fun. What is a tele-prompted empty suit to do? Three days ago Howard Fineman was dissing the prez. Yesterday, Richard Cohen. Now it’s the New Yorker’s George Packer.

… People in the Administration tell me that the horror of unauthorized press accounts is of a piece with the no-drama Obama campaign. They say that Obama hates “process” stories because they end up focussing on trivial matters of personality. They also say that the White House wants to give the impression that everything flows from the top.

This last is the one that troubles me most. Even if such a thing were possible, it isn’t healthy. I’d even say it’s undemocratic. Something as vast and complex as the U.S. government cannot be presented to the public along the same lines as a Presidential campaign. In the end—I saw this happen to the Bush Administration in Iraq—the result is that the White House doesn’t seal information in, but, instead, it seals itself off from information. The levers of government eventually stop working because no one in the bureaucracy wants to explain what’s going on for fear of the White House press office, which means the ability to think clearly grows sclerotic. …

Chicago Trib’s John Kass tells us why there’s a trip to Denmark to sell Chicago’s Olympics. One of Pickings readers says Obama is having a rough week since he is forced to go to Copenhagen and say nice things about our country.

… It is about paying political debts. It is about waltzing with the one that brought him to the dance, not so much Michelle, as dancing with the little guy with the short shanks on the 5th floor of City Hall.

So he will fly halfway around the world when he doesn’t have the time, with so many other items on his agenda, because he has to.

He’s Chicago’s president. And he got the call from the boss.

Boy! We’re so lucky Michelle and Barack are in the White House. Byron York writes about the “sacrifice” Michelle made.

In her speech in Copenhagen today, First Lady Michelle Obama said her trip to Denmark, along with the travel of her “dear friend” and “chit-chat buddy” Oprah Winfrey, as well as tomorrow’s visit by President Obama, is a “sacrifice” on behalf of the children of Chicago and the United States. “As much of a sacrifice as people say this is for me or Oprah or the president to come for these few days,” the first lady told a crowd of people involved in the Chicago project, “so many of you in this room have been working for years to bring this bid home.” …

Krauthammer’s Take from the Corner is rich.

On the positive achievements of the Obama administration:

“To me, that is a lightning round question, but I will dig deep and I will give him credit for continuing the Bush policy of the rendition and detention without trial.

Rendition is handing over a bad guy that you capture abroad over to another country, which was denounced by the left in the Bush years as inhuman. And detention without trial, of course, was attacked by the Democratic left as a rape of the constitution.

So I’m glad Obama is continuing the inhumanity and the constitutional rape of the Bush administration. It shows a certain broadmindedness.

(LAUGHTER)

I will give him credit for one other thing, for having so depleted his political capital on health care that he really doesn’t have the charisma and political resources now to do a lot of mischief.”

Phillip Howard in WSJ says tort reform is absent from ObamaCare because the trial lawyers own the Dems.

Eliminating defensive medicine could save upwards of $200 billion in health-care costs annually, according to estimates by the American Medical Association and others. The cure is a reliable medical malpractice system that patients, doctors and the general public can trust.

But this is the one reform Washington will not seriously consider. That’s because the trial lawyers, among the largest contributors to the Democratic Party, thrive on the unreliable justice system we have now.

Almost all the other groups with a stake in health reform—including patient safety experts, physicians, the AARP, the Chamber of Commerce, schools of public health—support pilot projects such as special health courts that would move beyond today’s hyper-adversarial malpractice lawsuit system to a court that would quickly and reliably distinguish between good and bad care. The support for some kind of reform reflects a growing awareness among these groups that managing health care sensibly, including containing costs, is almost impossible when doctors go through the day thinking about how to protect themselves from lawsuits. …

Tom Friedman is worried about incivility in DC. Peter Wehner has thoughts.

… I’ve written before about the importance of civility in public discourse and the need for what has been called the “etiquette of democracy.” One question, though: When George W. Bush was being routinely savaged by those on the Left—including prominent Democrats like Ted Kennedy, Al Gore, John Kerry, and Harry Reid—where were those Friedman columns of ringing condemnation? I don’t recall them; perhaps you do. …

Michael Barone notices things others don’t. Last month the percentage of Americans who were foreign born declined. First decline in almost 40 years.

… On their face, the numbers do not sound stunning. The Census Bureau’s American Community Survey reported that the foreign-born percentage of the nation’s population was 12.6 percent on July 1, 2007, and 12.5 percent on July 1, 2008, and there is some margin of error in ACS data. Nonetheless, this 0.1 percent refers to a large number of people. The foreign-born population was 38,048,456 according to the 2007 ACS and (by my calculation) about 38,007,466 (12.5 percent of 304,059,728) according to the 2008 ACS. That’s a decline of about 40,000 people—and a sharp reversal of trend.

The foreign-born percentage of the U.S. population rose from 9.7 percent in 1850 to 14.7 percent in 1890, subsided slightly to 13.6 percent in 1900 and then rose to 14.7 percent again in 1910.1 Immigration was cut off during the war years 1914 to 1918 and then by restrictive immigration laws passed in 1921 and 1924, and as immigrants died off the foreign-born percentage fell to a post-1850 low of 4.7 percent in 1970. It has risen relentlessly since then, as Latin and Asian immigration has surged, contrary to the expectations of the framers of the 1965 immigration act, to 12.6 percent in 2007, a figure almost as high as those recorded in decennial censuses from 1860 to 1920. …

This is rich. WaPo says that Raúl Castro is introducing private farms in Cuba. Lenin did this 88 years ago when he announced the New Economic Policy in 1921 so that the first communist famine in Russia, might end. In a speech defending against charges he sold out to the capitalists, Lenin assured followers (Trotsky among them) the government would control “the commanding heights” of the economy. Another memorable phrase, like “useful idiots”, from the mind of Vladimir Ilyich.

… The Cuban government, in its most dramatic reform since Castro took over for his ailing older brother Fidel three years ago, is offering private farmers such as Fuentes the use of fallow state lands to grow crops — for a profit.

Capitalism comes to the communist isle? Not quite, but close. Raúl Castro prefers to call it “a new socialist model.” But Fuentes gets to pocket some extra cash.

“The harder you work, the better you do,” said Fuentes, who immediately understood the concept.

Castro’s government says it has lent 1.7 million acres of unused state land in the past year to 82,000 Cubans in an effort to cut imports, which currently make up 60 percent of the country’s food supply. …

…At a major speech honoring the revolution in July, Castro smacked his hand on the podium and announced: “The land is there, and here are the Cubans! Let’s see if we can get to work or not, if we produce or not, if we keep our word. It is not a question of yelling ‘Fatherland or Death!’ or ‘Down with imperialism!’ or ‘The blockade hurts us!’ The land is there waiting for our sweat.”  …

Mark Steyn waited a few weeks to note his run-ins with Ted Kennedy.

I was overseas when Sen. Edward Kennedy died, and a European reporter asked me what my “most vivid memory” of the great man was. I didn’t like to say, because it didn’t seem quite the appropriate occasion. But my only close encounter with the Lion of the Senate was many years ago at Logan Airport late one night. A handful of us, tired and bedraggled, were standing on the water shuttle waiting to be ferried across the harbor to downtown Boston. A sixth gentleman hopped aboard, wearing the dark-suited garb of the advance man, and had a word in a crew member’s ear, and so we waited, and waited, in the chilly Atlantic air, wondering which eminence was the cause of our delay. And suddenly there he was on the quay, looming out of the fog. He stepped aboard. The small launch lurched and rocked, waves splashed the deck, luggage danced in the air, and the five of us all grabbed for whatever rail was to hand as the realization dawned that we’d been signed up for a watery excursion with Senator Kennedy. …

P. J. O’Rourke is getting tired from all the hating he’s been doing. You know, being a right winger and all.

Whew, I’m pooped. Jimmy Carter has got me run ragged with all the hating I’m supposed to do. Jimmy says I’m a racist because I oppose President Obama’s health care reform program. Even Jimmy Carter can’t be wrong all the time. And since Jimmy Carter has been wrong about every single thing for the past 44 years, maybe–just as a matter of statistical probability–he’s right this time.

I hadn’t noticed I was a racist, but that was no doubt because I was too busy being a homophobe. Nancy Pelosi says the angry opposition to health care reform is like the angry opposition to gay rights that led to Harvey Milk being shot. Since I do not want America to suffer another Sean Penn movie, I will accept that I’m a homophobe, too. And I’m a male chauvinist due to the fact that I think Nancy Pelosi is blowing smoke–excuse me, carbon neutral, biodegradable airborne particulate matter–out her pantsuit. …

Dilbert has figured out China is doomed. Hint; it has to do with lawyers.

Scrappleface is here.

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Sunday night’s Pickings carried an item from Big Government.com about Sarkozy’s simmering dissent from Obama’s UN charade. WSJ editors give us some of the back story rooted in the way the clandestine Iranian facility was revealed.

President Obama wants a unified front against Iran, and to that end he stood together with Nicolas Sarkozy and Gordon Brown in Pittsburgh on Friday morning to reveal the news about Tehran’s secret facility to build bomb-grade fuel. But now we hear that the French and British leaders were quietly seething on stage, annoyed by America’s handling of the announcement. …

… We thought we’d never see the day when the President of France shows more resolve than America’s Commander in Chief for confronting one of the gravest challenges to global security. But here we are.

Jennifer Rubin comments on the Pittsburgh story.

… So what does this say about Obama’s search for “consensus”? It’s a very odd consensus that rejects the opinions of Britain and France (for more immediate and robust action) and waits for Russia and China to join in. This provides further evidence that the president’s favorite phrases—”multilateral action” and “international community”—exist only in the make-believe world of his own speeches. In the real world populated by actual nations with diverse interests, you can’t please them all, especially when it’s anything important. Waiting for some nations to finally agree with us is in itself off-putting to other nations who want prompt action. …

Yesterday it was Howard Fineman suggesting the kid president get off the TV. Today Richard Cohen of WaPo telling what he thinks is wrong.

… The trouble with Obama is that he gets into the moment and means what he says for that moment only. He meant what he said when he called Afghanistan a “war of necessity” — and now is not necessarily so sure. He meant what he said about the public option in his health-care plan — and then again maybe not. He would not prosecute CIA agents for getting rough with detainees — and then again maybe he would.

Most tellingly, he gave Congress an August deadline for passage of health-care legislation — “Now, if there are no deadlines, nothing gets done in this town . . . ” — and then let it pass. It seemed not to occur to Obama that a deadline comes with a consequence — meet it or else.

Obama lost credibility with his deadline-that-never-was, and now he threatens to lose some more with his posturing toward Iran. He has gotten into a demeaning dialogue with Ahmadinejad, an accomplished liar. (The next day, the Iranian used a news conference to counter Obama and, days later, Iran tested some intermediate-range missiles.) Obama is our version of a Supreme Leader, not given to making idle threats, setting idle deadlines, reversing course on momentous issues, creating a TV crisis where none existed or, unbelievably, pitching Chicago for the 2016 Olympics. Obama’s the president. Time he understood that.

More on Honduras from Michael Totten.

… Sanctions are supposed to be temporary. Targeted countries are always told what they can do to restore the status quo ante. Iran, for instance, can dismantle its nuclear-weapons program. Syria can cease and desist its support for Hamas and Hezbollah. Saddam Hussein, while he still ruled Iraq, had the option of admitting weapons inspectors.

Honduras, though, will have no way out if the interim government doesn’t return Zelaya to power before his term ends in January. Because the Honduran constitution prohibits him and every other president from serving more than one term, it won’t be legally possible for Honduras to do what’s demanded of it after the end of this year. Unlike Iraq, Iran, and Syria, it will be isolated and trapped under sanctions indefinitely. …

Mark Steyn has some advice from The Corner.

… But, if we’re talking about letting the left “set the rules”, Mr Marcus’ column reminded me of a larger point: Don’t take your opponents at face value; listen to what they’re really saying. What does the frenzy unleashed on Sarah Palin last fall tell us? What does Newsweek’s “Mad Man” cover on Glenn Beck mean? Why have ”civility” drones like Joe Klein so eagerly adopted Anderson Cooper’s scrotal “teabagging” slur and characterized as “racists” and “terrorists” what are (certainly by comparison with the anti-G20 crowd) the best behaved and tidiest street agitators in modern history?

They’re telling you who they really fear. …

… The media would like the American right to be represented by the likes of Bob Dole and John McCain, decent old sticks who know how to give dignified concession speeches. Last time round, we went along with their recommendation. If you want to get rave reviews for losing gracefully, that’s the way to go. If you want to win, look at whom the Democrats and their media chums are so frantic to destroy: That’s the better guide to what they’re really worried about.

Michael F. Cannon and Ramesh Ponnuru do some ObamaCare fact checking.

It is a good thing that other congressmen did not follow Rep. Joe Wilson’s lead. If they yelled out every time President Obama said something untrue about health care, they would quickly find themselves growing hoarse.

By our count, the president made more than 20 inaccurate claims in his speech to Congress. We have excluded several comments that are deeply misleading but not outright false. (For example: Obama pledged not to tap the Medicare trust fund to pay for reform. But there is no money in that “trust fund,” anyway, so the pledge is meaningless.) Even so, we may have missed one or more false statements by the president. Our failure to include one of his comments in the following list should not be taken to constitute an endorsement of its accuracy, let alone wisdom. …

Byron York tells us what is really important. The One is going to Denmark on an errand for Mayor Daley.

With growing pressure for decisions on life-or-death issues in Afghanistan and Iran, this morning the White House announced that President Obama will soon travel to…Copenhagen. Obama will be in Denmark for just a few hours — he leaves this Thursday and returns Friday — which is just enough time to make a pitch for Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympic Games. He’ll be following First Lady Michelle Obama, who is also going to Copenhagen as part of the promote-Chicago team. Here is the White House press release: …

Scott Johnson of Power Line posts on the NY Times missing stories. First it was Van Jones. Then ACORN.

The videos posted by James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles at Big Government exposed ACORN housing officials around the country as eager to lend a hand. They wanted to help O’Keefe and Giles set up brothels in which minors from Central America would be set up as working girls. The New York Times did its damndest to ignore the story, until the political consequences of the videos made it almost impossible.

New York Times ombudsman Clark Hoyt takes up some of the obvious issues that arise from the Times’s treatment of the exposure of ACORN. Hoyt does a good job even if his column reads like deadpan comedy. …

There’s a great movie in here somewhere. But, will it be comedy or drama? WSJ reports on the Denver attorney representing Najibullah Zazi in his terror trial.

… Veteran criminal defense attorneys have been unusually blunt in assessing Mr. Folsom’s qualifications. “Mr. Folsom is just in over his head,” said prominent Denver defense lawyer Daniel Recht, citing Mr. Folsom’s performance so far and minimal experience in federal court.

With a shrug and a drag on his cigarette, Mr. Folsom begs to differ. “I’ve been practicing criminal defense for 10 years,” he says. “This is an enormous case, but when you get down to the core principles, it’s about criminal defense.” …

Under the heading of The Law is an Ass, read this story about the state’s threats to a woman helping her neighbors.